James Elroy Flecker

Flecker, in his rooms at Cambridge

James Elroy Flecker (5 November 1884 - 3 January 1915) was an English poet, novelist and playwright. As a poet he was most influenced by the Parnassian poets.

Biography

He was born on 5 November 1884 in Lewisham, London, and baptised Herman Elroy Flecker, later choosing to use the first name "James", either because he disliked the name "Herman" or to avoid confusion with his father. "Roy", as he was known to his family, was educated at Dean Close School, Cheltenham, where his father was headmaster, and Uppingham School. He studied at Trinity College, Oxford, and Caius College, Cambridge. While at Oxford he was greatly influenced by the last flowering of the Aesthetic movement there, under John Addington Symonds.

From 1910 Flecker was in the consular service, in the Eastern Mediterranean. On a ship to Athens he met Helle Skiadaressi,, and in 1911 he married her.

One of his better-known poems is To a Poet a Thousand Years Hence. An enduring testimony to his work is the excerpt from Hassan ... The Golden Journey to Samarkand inscribed on the clock tower of the barracks of the British Army's 22 Special Air Service regiment in Hereford:

"We are the Pilgrims, master; we shall go
Always a little further; it may be
Beyond that last blue mountain barred with snow
Across that angry or that glimmering sea." The same inscription also appears on the NZSAS monument at Rennie Lines in the Papakura Military Camp.

Flecker died on 3 January 1915, of tuberculosis, in Davos, Switzerland. His death at the age of thirty was described at the time as "unquestionably the greatest premature loss that English literature has suffered since the death of Keats".

His poem The Bridge of Fire is featured in Neil Gaiman's Sandman series, in the volume The Wake. Agatha Christie quotes him several times especially in her final novel, Postern of Fate. A quatrain from his poem To a Poet a Thousand Years Hence is quoted by Jorge Luis Borges in his essay, Note on Walt Whitman (in the collection, Other Inquisitions, 1937-1952):

"O friend unseen, unborn, unknown,
student of our sweet English tongue,
read out my words at night, alone:
I was a poet, I was young."

Works

Poetry

• The Bridge of Fire (1907)
• Thirty-Six Poems (1910)
• Forty-Two Poems (1911) (eBook)
• The Golden Journey to Samarkand (1913)
• The Old Ships (1915)
• Collected Poems (1916)

Novels

• The Last Generation: A Story of the Future (1908)
• The King of Alsander (1914)

Drama

• Hassan (1922; full title Hassan: The Story of Hassan of Baghdad and How he Came to Make the Golden Journey to Samarkand)

• Incidental music to the play was written by Frederick Delius in 1920, before the play's publication, and first performed in September 1923.

• Don Juan (1925)

Other

• The Grecians (1910)
• The Scholars' Italian Book (1911)
• Collected Prose (1920)
• The Letters of J.E. Flecker to Frank Savery (1926)
• Some Letters from Abroad of James Elroy Flecker (1930)

Bibliography

• James Elroy Flecker (1922) by Douglas Goldring
• An Essay on Flecker (1937) by T. E. Lawrence
• No Golden Journey: A Biography of James Elroy Flecker (1973) by John Sherwood
• James Elroy Flecker (1976) by John M. Munro

External links

• James Elroy Flecker Collection University of Gloucestershire Archives and Special Collections
• Works by James Elroy Flecker at Project Gutenberg
• James Elroy Flecker at Find a Grave
• The Golden Journey to Samarkand translated to Polish
• Performance of Serenade From Hassan by Julian Lloyd Webber
• To a Poet a Thousand Year Hence translated to Russian