BH. John Gould Fletcher

31. Yearsley, Meredith. ‘John Gould Fletcher’. In American Poets, 1880-1945, 1st ser., edited by Peter Quartermain. Dictionary of Literary Biography 45. Detroit: Gale, 1986.

One can hardly dispute Yearsley’s contention that after 1915 Fletcher decided that among the ‘most urgent tasks of the twentieth century . . . was to remold the world by bringing Eastern and Western philosophies together’ (see especially 13), but if, as Yearsley contends, it was because of this decision that Fletcher ‘decided his purpose as an artist should be to criticize America’s aggressive materialism by affirming this Eastern vision’, then his later work, with its celebration of the pastoral harmonies of the American South, could be said to have grown from his earlier interests in Japanese and Chinese tradition, a point consistent with Stephens’s encompassing thesis about the importance of Japan and China in Fletcher’s work (see 27 and 28). Carpenter (34), in contrast, sees the causal relationship moving in the other direction: Fletcher’s agrarianism was primary, he believes, and provided the groundwork for his interest in the principles of Chinese and Japanese aesthetics.