John Gould Fletcher is considered by many literary scholars to be among the most innovative twentieth-century poets. He enjoyed an international reputation for much of his long career and earned the Pulitzer Prize in poetry in 1939. Fletcher lived in England from 1909 to 1932 and while in Europe he associated closely with Amy Lowell, Ezra Pound, and other Imagist poets. In addition to being an adherent of Imagism, which used free verse and was dedicated to replacing traditional poetics with new...

Irradiations; Sand and Spray, is the first book of poetry by John Gould Fletcher, published in 1915. Mr Fletcher was part of a group of poets known as imagist poets, which included Amy Lowell and Ezra Pound. Ezra Pound commended Fletcher for the individuality of rhythm in this, his first volume of poems. Fletcher describes his views on the rhythm of poetry as thus: “I maintain that poetry is capable of as many gradations in cadence as music is in time.” - Summary by Nemo