John Gould Fletcher’s return to Arkansas from England in 1933 was, according to biographer Ben Johnson of Southern Arkansas University, a “return to a place far from centers of literary ambition” in an attempt “stabilize his bipolar condition.”

Soon after his return, the noted poet was working with folklorist Vance Randolph to collect and promote mountain folk songs and stories.

Hanging out in the Ozarks and the Ouachitas was a long way from hanging out with Ezra Pound in London and T.S. Eliot in Paris.

Randolph had been born in 1892 at Pittsburg, Kan., and was, according to Robert Cochran in the Encyclopedia of Arkansas History & Culture, a person who was “born to the respectable center” but also was “attracted to the margins, to the rich ethnic and cultural diversity and radical politics of the region’s mining communities. He dropped out of high school and published his first writing for leftist periodicals.”

Randolph graduated in 1914 from what’s now Pittsburg State University and later completed a master’s degree at Clark University. He was attracted to the Ozarks and settled in Pineville, Mo., in 1920. He married a local woman and began to study the Ozark culture.

Cochran writes that Randolph’s works were “ignored by most academic reviewers and sometimes resented by Ozarkers themselves for their celebration of backward elements in the region’s culture. More recent students have recognized them as pioneering examples of what are now called folklife studies, and in the 1970s especially, scholars began praising Randolph for his prescience in this and other areas. Randolph collected folklore steadily through the 1930s and 1940s, even as he supported himself with everything from writing articles for sporting magazines to various works for juvenile readers.”

Randolph began collecting traditional music in the 1920s. He lived in Arkansas for most of the 1940s and 1950s, calling Eureka Springs and Fayetteville home. His first wife died in 1937, and he married a University of Arkansas English professor, Mary Celestia Parler, in 1962. Randolph continued to publish books until the 1970s. A collection of folk tales titled “Pissing in the Snow” was published in 1976 when Randolph was 84 and proved to be his most popular book. He died in November 1980 and is buried at National Cemetery in Fayetteville.

Randolph and the temperamental Fletcher were a strange pair as they made their way through the Ozarks and Ouachitas. Fletcher was among the first people to bring attention to folk singer Emma Dusenbury, who now has more than 100 songs archived at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.

Dusenbury was born in Georgia in 1862 and moved with her parents to Arkansas in 1872. They first lived in Crittenden County but later moved west to Baxter County. A serious illness in the 1890s left Dusenbury blind. She and her husband, an Illinois native, settled near Mena in 1907. Her husband worked for the railroad and in packing plants. He died in 1933.

“During the late 1920s and early 1930s, guided by F.M. Goodhue, a teacher at a nearby radical labor school, Commonwealth College, Dusenbury was recorded by some of the best-known folksong collectors in the region and nation,” Cochran writes. “John Lomax, Vance Randolph and Sidney Robertson all visited, as did poet John Gould Fletcher and Little Rock composer and symphony director Laurence Powell. All were greatly impressed. Lomax wrote in his autobiography that she sang continuously for two days and recorded more traditional Anglo-American ballads than any other singer.

“Dusenbury’s one brush with celebrity came in 1936 when she sang in Little Rock as part of the celebration of Arkansas’ statehood centennial. Her photograph appeared in the newspaper along with two feature articles about her (one written by Powell) that are even today the primary sources of information about her. Powell later based the final movement of his ‘Second Symphony’ on three of her traditional songs.”

Dusenbury died in May 1941 and is buried (as “Emmer Duesberry”) in the Polk County community of Rocky.

Fletcher also was part of that 1936 centennial celebration in Arkansas, hired by Arkansas Gazette publisher John Netherland Heiskell to write an epic poem titled “The Story of Arkansas.”

After moving back to Arkansas from England, Fletcher lived for a time in the Pike mansion at Little Rock with his sister, Adolphine Fletcher Terry. They had been raised in the huge home built by Albert Pike.

Three years older than her brother, Adolphine also became a well-known figure. She enrolled at Vassar College when she was just 15 and graduated in 1902.

Peggy Harris writes for the Encyclopedia of Arkansas History & Culture that Adolphine and “another Vassar graduate from Arkansas, Blanche Martin, were asked to serve on a national committee to investigate the state’s education needs. They discovered a system of mostly one-room schoolhouses among 5,000 school districts, inadequate supervision and no consistent policies. The two made school consolidation their cause, writing articles for newspapers, making speeches and lobbying. In 1908, Fletcher was leading efforts consolidate school districts, appoint professional county superintendents and provide school transportation in rural Arkansas.

“As a young college graduate, she also co-founded a group to encourage women to become college educated. The group eventually became the Little Rock branch of the American Association of University Women. She also formed the first School Improvement Association in Arkansas, forerunner of the Parent Teacher Association; organized the first juvenile court in Arkansas in 1910; and chaired the Pulaski County Juvenile Court board for about 20 years.”

Adolphine’s lifelong interest in education led her and two friends, Vivion Brewer of Scott and Velma Powell of Little Rock, to form the Women’s Emergency Committee after a ballot measure to close Little Rock high schools as a way to avoid desegregation passed in 1958. The WEC led the successful effort to reopen the schools in 1959. Adolphine’s husband, David D. Terry, served in Congress from 1933 until giving up his seat in the House in 1942 to run for the U.S. Senate. He lost the Senate race to John L. McClellan.

Ben Johnson writes that even though John Gould Fletcher was living in the majestic Pike mansion with David and Adolphine Terry, “the prominence of the poet’s family did not keep many in his hometown from regarding him as remote.”

In January 1936, Fletcher married writer Charlie May Simon.

The prolific Simon wrote almost 30 books and dozens of short stories. Since 1971, the Charlie May Simon Book Award has been presented in Arkansas to honor her work in the area of children’s literature.

Simon was born in Drew County in 1897 as Charlie May Hogue. Her family moved to Memphis when she was three. Her father was a teacher and writer.

“Hogue’s first marriage was to Walter Lowenstein, a wealthy heir of a Memphis mercantile business, but she was widowed while still in her 20s,” Toran Isom writes for the Encyclopedia of Arkansas History & Culture. “She wanted to enhance and expand her perspectives in the world of art so she used the financial settlement from her first marriage and moved to Chicago and later to Paris. In Paris, she met and married Howard Simon, an artist who would become the illustrator of her books. The two married in 1926, and she became Charlie Mae Simon, the professional name she used for the rest of her life.

“Simon returned to Arkansas with her husband. This was during the time of the Great Depression, and money was scarce. The two resided in a mountainside log cabin that they built in Perry County with help from neighbors. Simon planned the cabin, drawing the outline for the walls with a stick in the dirt. In the 1930s, she returned to writing, in part because they needed the money and because she wanted to tell of the Ozark way of life and the strong people who lived it.

“Simon enjoyed the hard work on the homestead, but her husband did not. She and Howard divorced, and though he returned to Paris, he still served as illustrator for her books. Simon’s first major work for children was ‘Robin on the Mountain.’ It was published in 1934 and is considered by many to be a classic in the field of children’s literature.”

Fletcher became aware of Simon’s work, and Simon was aware of Fletcher’s writing.

“Fletcher and Simon spent their childhoods geographically somewhat close to each other, but they had very different experiences,” Isom writes. “Fletcher knew a more privileged way of life that had allowed him time and space to reflect on subjects such as flowers, lakes and trees. Simon wrote about the humble folk she knew as a child. … Though the two had great respect for each other’s writing, their styles remained distinct, Fletcher in the spare style of the poet; Simon in her painstaking, conscientious prose.”

In 1939, reporters at the Arkansas Gazette learned that Fletcher had won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his “Selected Poems,” which had been published in 1938. Heiskell dispatched two reporters to Fletcher’s home near Pinnacle Mountain to give him the news.

“He was the first Southern poet to receive the prize, although this volume was more heavily weighted toward his early free-verse experiments rather than his more decidedly Southern work,” Johnson writes. “Despite receipt of the prestigious award and induction into the National Institute of Arts and Letters, he did not gain a new readership. ‘The Burning Mountain,’ his last collection in 1946, was not widely recognized for containing vital, well-crafted poems. ‘Arkansas,’ his impressionistic history in 1947, served for many years as the most readable and accessible history of the state but attracted little attention elsewhere.”

In 1941, Fletcher and Simon moved to a wood-and-stone home at 10314 Cantrell Road on the far western edge of Little Rock known as Johnswood.

Isom writes: “The hearth and the books were Johnswood’s most important features. Fletcher and Simon believed that writing was something of an individual pursuit. After breakfasting together, each would retire to his or her respective study, where they created their individual works. Afternoons were spent enjoying and keeping up the grounds. A raccoon appeared regularly, accepting its daily bread from Simon’s hand.”

Johnson describes Fletcher and Simon as a “restless couple” who traveled frequently in the years prior to the Johnswood purchase for extended stays in places such as New York, Santa Fe and the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire. They traveled less after building Johnswood. It was during a stay at the MacDowell Colony that Fletcher wrote his autobiography, “Life Is My Song,” which appeared in 1937.

The Poetry Foundation notes that the years that followed the move to Johnswood “were apparently calmer. Fletcher was settled and older, and he had received a certain amount of recognition. But inwardly he still hated the materialistic, mechanized world he saw being built up about him.”

Johnson says that, by the late 1940s, “the knowledge that he was falling into obscurity, coupled with worsening arthritis, ignited more bouts with depression.”

On May 10, 1950, Fletcher walked to a shallow pond near Johnswood, neatly folded his jacket on the bank and drowned himself. He’s buried at Little Rock’s Mount Holly Cemetery.

The Central Arkansas Library System later would name one of its branches after him.

In the late 1980s, the University of Arkansas Press started reprinting some of his works as part of its John Gould Fletcher series.

“Simon continued to reside at Johnswood after initially doubting whether she could, though she did travel the globe,” Isom writes. “Her writing in her later years moved significantly toward the biographical. She focused on the truly great difference-making people of her day, people often associated with bringing peace and a sense of humanity to the world. Simon spent some time in Japan and taught English at the Women’s University in Tokyo. She continued to work hard on her writing craft and was known for her in-depth research. She traveled to Africa and spent time with Albert Schweitzer.”

Simon died in March 1977 and also is buried at Mount Holly.

The Poetry Foundation sums up John Gould Fletcher this way: “Fletcher’s work is most generally recognized for its idiosyncratic innovations, and the connections between his aesthetic choices and those of the prevailing literary trends of the first half of the 20th century. After a clumsy but promising beginning, Fletcher’s experiments gave rise to highly unusual and interesting results — poetic symphonies and paintings, and an emphasis on undidactic directness in the evocation of emotion.

“While he was always prey to criticisms about his coldness and verbosity, he was seen as part of a new wave in poetics, bringing in a fresh vigor and musicality. His later poems, which deal more openly with questions of salvation and social directions, are regarded by most as documents attesting to a particular trend, a reaction against full-scale industrialization. He enjoyed a rare connectedness with the brightest lights in poetry and brought that cosmopolitan sensibility back to Arkansas.”

It’s a safe bet that few of the people who enter the John Gould Fletcher Library at 823 N. Buchanan St. in Little Rock know anything about the man for whom the facility is named.

Fletcher was the first Arkansan to be awarded a Pulitzer Prize. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1939 when the poor Southern state was still struggling to escape the Great Depression.

When those of us at the Arkansas Humanities Council (on which I’ve served for the past five years) were developing a lecture series to mark the 100th year of the Pulitzer Prizes being awarded, it seemed natural to make the first talk in the series about Fletcher.

So it was that the eminent Arkansas historian Ben Johnson of Southern Arkansas University took the stage at the Ron Robinson Theater in downtown Little Rock last Thursday night to talk about Fletcher’s life. Johnson is the author of a biography of Fletcher — “Fierce Solitude: A Life of John Gould Fletcher” — which was released in 1994 by the University of Arkansas Press.

Johnson’s talk was interesting, but it was not necessarily uplifting. Fletcher fought depression for much of his life. He committed suicide in May 1950 when he drowned himself in a shallow pond near his Little Rock home.

Here’s how the Poetry Foundation describes this native Arkansan: “John Gould Fletcher is considered by many literary scholars to be among the most innovative 20th century poets. He is closely associated with poet Amy Lowell and the Imagist movement she championed. In addition to being an adherent of Imagism, which was dedicated to replacing traditional poetics with a more concise use of language, new rhythms and a concrete rather than discursive or symbolic treatment of subject, Fletcher also wrote poetry that drew from such varied sources as French Symbolism, Oriental art and philosophy, and music.

“Later in his career, Fletcher concentrated less on technical innovation and began to develop themes he had previously only touched upon in his work, including humanity’s relation to nature and the individual’s search for God and salvation. During this period, he also became associated with the Fugitives, a group of American poets dedicated to reviving an agrarian way of life and traditional Southern values.”

Fletcher was born in Little Rock on Jan. 3, 1886. His father was a Confederate veteran (also named John Gould Fletcher) who made a fortune after the Civil War as a cotton broker and then purchased much of what’s now downtown Little Rock.

His mother was named Adolphine Krause Fletcher.

Johnson writes in a biographical sketch of Fletcher for the Encyclopedia of Arkansas History & Culture: “Fletcher’s mother had abandoned the prospect of a musical career to tend to her ailing mother and likely centered her artistic ambitions on her only son. Fletcher was reared and educated by tutors in the company of his two sisters, Adolphine and Mary. As a child, he was rarely permitted to leave the grounds of the antebellum mansion — built by Albert Pike and purchased by the Fletchers in 1889 — that was his home. Fletcher developed a dense imaginative life, nurtured by his reading of Poe, Coleridge and Goethe.”

Pike, who built the massive home that’s now owned by the Arkansas Arts Center, is one of the most fascinating figures in Arkansas history. He was born in Boston in December 1809, began to write poetry as a young man and wound up in Arkansas teaching school in the Fort Smith area in the early 1830s. He often would write letters to the editor of newspapers signed Casca after one of the Roman politicians who had assassinated Julius Caesar.

Charles Bertrain, who owned a Whig Party newspaper known as the Arkansas Advocate, was impressed by Pike’s writing ability and hired him as the newspaper’s editor. Pike moved to Little Rock to edit the newspaper and also began working for the Arkansas Legislature as a clerk. Pike married a wealthy Little Rock resident, Mary Ann Hamilton, and the money she brought to the marriage allowed Pike to buy the newspaper in 1835. He later became a lawyer.

Historian Carl Moneyhon of the University of Arkansas at Little Rock summed up Pike this way for the Encyclopedia of Arkansas: “He was a lawyer who played a major role in the development of the early courts of Arkansas and played an active role in the state’s politics prior to the Civil War. He also was a central figure in the development of Masonry in the state and later became a national leader of that organization. During the Civil War, he commanded the Confederacy’s Indian Territory, raising troops there and exercising field command in one battle. He also was a talented poet and writer.”

Like the man who built what’s now known as the Pike-Fletcher-Terry Mansion, young John Gould Fletcher was attracted to poetry. Fletcher’s father was 55 at the time of his birth and a remote figure. Fletcher’s mother was 24 years younger than her husband. Her interests were music, literature and the arts.

The Poetry Foundation says of John Gould Fletcher’s early years: “Fletcher often spoke of the gloom and desolation of (the large house built by Pike). Even at an early age, his life was characterized by a solitude from which he would never completely emerge. Having little social life, Fletcher became a voracious reader. His preferences ran toward the decadent and pessimistic, especially as he grew older. The writings of Edgar Allan Poe were his constant companions in adolescence, and while attending Harvard he developed a lifelong love of French literature, devouring the works of Theophile Gautier and Charles Baudelaire, as well as Dante Rossetti, William Morris, Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde. It was at this time that Fletcher began writing poetry of his own, though he seldom showed it to anyone, being an entirely private person.

“Fletcher did not prosper at Harvard. His did not fit into Massachusetts society well, neglected the syllabi to pursue his own reading and skipped classes regularly so as to have more time for the University Library, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the symphony. Determined to pursue a literary career, his lack of application in his studies was the cause of considerable friction between Fletcher and his father, who wanted him to become a banker or lawyer.

“When his father died in 1906, Fletcher inherited the family fortune and a sizable annuity. Apparently unable to see the point of further education, and against the wishes of his mother, who like his father felt he should leave literature on the side and take on a profession, Fletcher dropped out of Harvard just before the final exams in 1907. The following year he departed the country for Italy. When his mother died in 1910, he did not return home.”

Fletcher had spent a year at Phillips Andover Academy in Andover, Mass., before enrolling at Harvard. A 1905 train journey to the American West helped inspire his poetry. Johnson notes that “the regular checks from a trust fund did not relieve his anxieties about his livelihood. His anxieties and sudden rages grew from his bipolar disorder, an illness marked by cyclical episodes that first erupted during his college years.”

Fletcher spent time in Venice and Rome after heading to Europe. The Poetry Foundation says he “soaked up the atmosphere, flirted with the idea of converting to Roman Catholicism, wrote more poetry and read voraciously. In 1909, he relocated to London, where he began to meet other poets and artists. His interest in painting was especially strong, and he never missed an important exhibition. This abiding fascination with both the arts and music would deeply influence his later poetry, although at the time his work was fairly conventional. He doggedly assailed publishers with his poems, but to no success. Finally, he approached four different publishers and arranged to finance five volumes of his poetry himself. All five appeared in May 1913.

“Critical reception to Fletcher’s work was lukewarm.  … Fletcher himself was the severest critic of these books — within roughly one year of their publication, he had the unsold copies pulped and referred to them as mere juvenilia for the rest of his life.”

Fletcher later met poet Ezra Pound, who convinced Fletcher to help underwrite the magazine the Egoist. Pound, in turn, introduced Fletcher to Amy Lowell.

“Pound promoted Fletcher’s free-verse experiments to Harriet Monroe, founder of Poetry magazine, and invited Fletcher to join a group of poets that Pound had dubbed Des Imagistes,” Johnson writes. “However, Fletcher resisted Pound’s attempts to revise his poems. Only when Amy Lowell, who was less dogmatic on poetic principles, supplanted Pound as the leader of the group did Fletcher agree to include his work in Imagist anthologies. In 1914, Fletcher sailed to America. He wrote incessantly during his tour.”

Fletcher later returned to England and married Florence Emily “Daisy” Arbuthnot, who recently had been divorced, in July 1916. Fletcher had become involved with the older (and still married) Arbuthnot when he was 27. They began living together in 1914. A visit to Little Rock during the winter of 1914-15 was, according to the Poetry Foundation, “the occasion for rueful and gloomy reminiscences about his childhood.”

The Poetry Foundation says that starting in 1916, Fletcher’s life “ran aground. His new marriage with Arbuthnot was rapidly showing itself to be a mistake, his poems were no longer being accepted, his literary contacts were drying up. He had moved to Sydenham in England to be with his wife, and for several years he more or less languished there. During this time, the exuberance of his early poetry dimmed, and his work become more stolid, majestic and plain — and his initial prolixity dwindled, until he was producing almost nothing new. His work in the early 1920s is characterized by a concern with the history and future of America, which he felt was headed to its own destruction in a nihilistic industrial downward spiral.”

During a tour of the American South in 1927, Fletcher fell in with the Fugitives, the group of poets at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn., that included John Crowe Ransom, Donald Davidson, Allen Tate and Robert Penn Warren.

Johnson writes that these young Southerners had become “increasingly unhappy with the direction of the industrial society. They organized the Agrarian movement to uphold the traditional hierarchy of the Old South as a better model for the good society. Fletcher eagerly enlisted in their causes, but his overwrought, anti-democratic essay on education in the Agrarian symposium ‘I’ll Take My Stand’ in 1930 signaled the onset of a depressive crisis.”

Fletcher attempted suicide in late 1932 and spent several months at the Royal Bethlehem Hospital in London, commonly known as Bedlam.

His divorce from Arbuthnot wasn’t finalized until 1936, but he had moved back to Arkansas in 1933.

“His marriage was clearly at an end, and he had no further desire to live in Europe,” the Poetry Society notes in its biographical sketch. “In 1933, he moved back to Little Rock, where he was received as the poet laureate and premier intellectual in the state. He received an honorary doctorate from the University of Arkansas, founded the Arkansas Folk Lore Society in 1935 and produced ‘The Story of Arkansas’ for the state’s centennial in 1936.”

John Netherland Heiskell, the famous publisher of the Arkansas Gazette, had commissioned Fletcher to write the eic poem “The Story of Arkansas.”

Johnson writes: “A revised version of ‘The Story of Arkansas’ later appeared in his collection ‘South Star.’ Although the Arkansas poem suggested his recent allegiance to his native region, the publication of his memoir, ‘Life is My Song,’ the following year concentrated on his early Imagist career.”

In the next blog post, we’ll focus on the final 14 years of his life.