Selected Essays of Fletcher

Seldom read today, Fletcher was a Pulitzer Prize-winning Imagist poet, a close associate of Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell, and a leading American exponent of modernism. The articulate, engaging essays collected here first appeared in Poetry , Dial and Yale Review ; most of them deal with poetry, which Fletcher claimed as central among all the arts. In one combative piece he calls Wallace Stevens ``a dramatist without a theme'' and observes that Robert Frost is ``neither temperamentally nor by birth a New Englander.'' Although he admires Pound, he objects to the latter's ``purely aesthetic and non-moral sensibility.'' There are discerning appreciations of Hardy, Sandburg, Blake, Whiteman, Conrad Aiken, as well as critical appraisals of Southern Fugitive-Agrarians such as John Crowe Ransom, with whom Fletcher was associated after he returned to the U.S. from self-imposed exile in Europe. The essays on Chinese and Japanese art, politics and Oriental versus Occidental attitudes, however, are lightweight. (Sept.)