Poetry
Fletcher's early works include Irradiations: Sand and Spray (1915), and Goblins and Pagodas (1916). Amy Lowell said of him, 'no one is more absolute master of the rhythm of verse libre. Fletcher invented the term 'polyphonic prose' to describe some poetic experiments of Amy Lowell, a form he himself, also experimented with in his Goblins & Pagodas. In later poetic works Fletcher returned to more traditional forms. These include The Black Rock (1928), Selected Poems (1938), for which he won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1939, and The Burning Mountain (1946). Fletcher later returned to his home in Arkansas and reconnected with his roots. The subject of his works turned increasingly towards Southern issues and Traditionalism.
In the late 1920s and 1930s Fletcher's was active with a group of 11 other Southern writers and poets known as the Southern Agrarians. This group published the classic Agrarian manifesto I'll Take My Stand, a collection of essays rejecting Modernity and Industrialism. In 1937 he wrote his autobiography, Life is My Song, and in 1947 he published Arkansas, a beautifully written history of his home state.
Read more about this topic: John Gould Fletcher
Famous quotes containing the word poetry:
“Art, if one employs this term in the broad sense that includes poetry within its realm, is an art of creation laden with ideals, located at the very core of the life of a people, defining the spiritual and moral shape of that life.”
—Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev (1818–1883)
“A man should have a farm or a mechanical craft for his culture. We must have a basis for our higher accomplishments, our delicate entertainments of poetry and philosophy, in the work of our hands.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“If poetry should address itself to the same needs and aspirations, the same hopes and fears, to which the Bible addresses itself, it might rival it in distribution.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)