Selected Poems

James Elroy Flecker, linguist, scholar, critic, poet, and diplomat, like his illustrious poetic peers, Wilfred Owen and Rupert Brooke, did not survive the First World War. All three died young: Owen and Brooke in the line of battle, and Flecker, who never fought due to a long-standing respiratory illness, in a sanatorium in Switzerland in 1915.

Flecker's poems are generally short: none of his original verse works exceeds 1200 words in length. It appears that he had no desire to create poetic epics like Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Endymion, or The Faerie Queene. Flecker revised his poems regularly, refining their spare but telling verbiage and achieving simplicity and directness which are peculiarly his own.

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