James Elroy Flecker

James Elroy Flecker (1884–1915) was a poetborn in London. Educated at Trinity College, Oxford, where he was influenced by the last flowering of the Aesthetic movement. He entered the consular service and went to Constantinople in 1910 and to Smyrna and Beirut in 1911. In 1911 he married a Greek woman, Helle Skiadaressi. He died of tuberculosis in 1915.

A friend, Frank Savery, remembers him as being a precocious and prolific writer, influenced particularly by Wilde's early verse and by Swinburne. In the course of his career he produced seeral volumes of lyrical romantic verse (some of which was included in Georgian Poetry) including The Bridge of Fire (1907), Forty-Two Poems (1911), and The Golden Journey to Samarkand (1913), and The Old Ships (1915).

James FleckerHe also published an experimental, highly individual novel, The King of Alsander (1914). The work for which he is best remembered is the posthumously published poetic Eastern play Hassan (1922), performed in 1923 with incidental music by delius. He also wrote the drama Don Juan.

At Oxford he had an intimate friendship with John D Beazeley, a year younger than himself, who was to become the greatest European scholar in the study of Greek vases. At the end of 1907 they spent some months together in Florence, and they were together again in Italy on summer 1908.

Flecker was a bisexual, and the one who took the initiative. Little is known about their relationship, besides what Flecker wrote in his quite explicit verse:

We that were friends tonight have found

A fear, a secret, and a shame:

I am on fire with that soft sound

You make, in uttering my name.

Forgive a young and boastful man

Whom dreams delight and passion please,

And love me as great women can

Who have no children at their knees.

References

Based on an article on the Koymasky website.