Page:The Dial (Volume 68).djvu/635

THE

DIAL

MAY 1920

Of the many young poets who died or were killed during the European war, none perhaps has proved a greater loss to English letters than James Elroy Flecker. By his death in Switzerland of consumption at the age of thirty England was deprived of a poet who loved her passionately, whose work will endure long into the days of peace, whose reputation is likely to go on increasing rather than to wane. At present his poetry is still, I think, not so generally familiar as it deserves to be, though the number of his admirers is steadily growing both in England and in America.

Flecker was never the idol of any particular set during his lifetime, and since his death very little has been written about his personality as it appeared to those who knew him, beyond Mr. Squire's valuable introduction to the Collected Poems. My first clear recollection of James Flecker centres on an evening spent with him in a Bloomsbury lodging house, in the early summer of 1907. He had come down from Oxford that year, and had recently, I think, been schoolmastering in Hampstead.

The house, which was in Torrington Square, on the left-hand side as you walk towards the Irvingite Church, seemed dark and half-deserted on my arrival, and its cavernous hall was illuminated only by one flickering gas-jet, half-way up the stairs. Flecker's sitting-room was at the back, on the second floor, and on the night of my visit it was in an extraordinary state of chaos, reminding one of nothing so much as the inner parlour of a second-hand book-seller's shop.