Ian Fletcher

Ian Fletcher (1920–1988) was an English poet, scholar and literary critic, specializing in Victorian literature. He edited definitive editions of the works of John Gray and Lionel Johnson, as well as publishing studies on such seminal fin-de-siècle figures as Aubrey Beardsley and Walter Pater. He spent the last six years of his life teaching at Arizona State University. His collected poems were published in 1998, ten years after his death.

Biography

Fletcher was born in a Streatham nursing home in 1920, the only child of John Archibald Fletcher (c.1887–1968), a farmer and retired army major, and Katherine Margaret Richardson (1888–1979). His parents separated before he was born. He grew up in Catford and Shepherd's Bush, and lived with his mother, a woman of forceful character. His family had strong Scottish antecedents and for a while as a young man he spelled his name Iain as a gesture to Scottish nationalism.

He was educated at Dulwich College. Money was short, and he left school at the age of 15 in order to earn a living. He worked as a librarian His last years were clouded by ill-health although he remained mentally alert to the end, dying in hospital in Birmingham in 1988.

He left a wife and two daughters.

Reception

The scholar John Stokes wrote that Fletcher already had his own style while taking his PhD, and that he and his supervisor, Donald Gordon, shared a belief in W. B. Yeats's greatness, and that "strange beliefs do not have to be believed to be thought interesting, or to be an essential tool for the understanding of great works of literature". They collaborated on a "pioneering" book on Yeats.

Books

By Fletcher

1953: The Complete Poems of Lionel Johnson (edited) (Unicorn Press) 1961: W.B. Yeats: Images of a Poet, with D. J. Gordon (Manchester University Press) 1967: Romantic Mythologies (Routledge) 1971: Walter Pater (British Council/Longmans) 1971: Meredith Now: Some Critical Essays (Routledge) 1979: Decadence and the 1890s (Holmes & Meier) 1981: A Catalogue of the Imagist Poets, with Wallace Martin (AMS Press) 1987: Aubrey Beardsley (Twayne) 1987: British Poetry and Prose 1870-1905, The Oxford Authors series (edited) (Oxford University Press) 1990: Rediscovering Herbert Horne: Poet, Architect, Typographer, Art Historian (ELT Press)

About Fletcher

1990: Essays & Poems: in memory of Ian Fletcher, 1920-1988 (University of North Carolina) 2009: Ian Fletcher: Poet and Scholar (Shoestring Press)