An Essay on Flecker

Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1937. First American edition, one of 56 copies to secure copyright. 4 pp. 1 vols. 8vo. Original wrappers, fine copy. First American edition, one of 56 copies to secure copyright. 4 pp. 1 vols. 8vo. Poet and diplomat James Elroy Flecker (1884-1915) burned bright and briefly. He joined the diplomatic service in 1908, trained for two years, and was posted to Constantinople in 1910, “but in September a slight fever was diagnosed as tuberculosis and he returned to England to a sanatorium. He pronounced himself cured and … went back to Constantinople in March 1911, to be transferred in April to Beirut. Flecker was not a (truncated) very efficient vice-consul” (ODNB). His first formal collection of verse, The Bridge of Fire, was published in 1907, and The Golden Journey to Samarkand was published in 1913. He died in Switzerland aged thirty-one.

According to O'Brien, An Essay on Flecker was “written in 1925 with the intention of publication in a periodical, [and] did not appear in print until 1937 when it was [first] issued in [a] very limited edition of 30 copies [by the Corvinus Press in London]. The poet James Elroy Flecker had been a friend of Lawrence's in Beirut before the war. None of the three appearances of this essay have been in trade editions" O'Brien A199 (Inventory #: 35750)