Fletcher, Angus 1930–

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Fletcher, Angus 1930–

(Angus John Stewart Fletcher)

PERSONAL: Born June 23, 1930, in New York, NY. Education: Yale University, B.A., 1950, M.A., 1952; University of Grenoble, diploma, 1951; Harvard University, Ph.D., 1958.

ADDRESSES: Home—New York, NY.

CAREER: Writer and educator. Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, instructor in English literature, 1958–62; Columbia University, New York City, 1962–68, began as assistant professor became associate professor; State University of New York at Buffalo, professor, 1968–74; Herbett H. Lehman College of the City University of New York, New York, NY, distinguished professor English and comparative literature, 1974–99, professor emeritus, 1999–. Visiting professor at University of California, Los Angeles, 1973–74; distinguished professor at Graduate Center of the City University of New York, 1974–; Dreyfuss Visiting Professor of Humanities at California Institute of Technology, 1977–78.

MEMBER: Renaissance Society of America, English Institute, Modern Language Association of America.

WRITINGS:

Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode, Cornell University Press (Ithaca, NY), 1964.

The Transcendental Masque: An Essay on Milton's Comus, Cornell University Press (Ithaca, NY), 1971.

The Prophetic Moment: An Essay on Spenser, University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 1971.

Positive Negation: Threshold, Sequence, and Personification in Coleridge, English Institute, 1972.

I. Richards and the Art of Critical Balance, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1973.

Allegory: Dictionary of the History of Ideas, Scribner (New York, NY), 1973.

(Editor and author of foreword) The Literature of Fact: Selected Papers from the English Institute, Columbia University Press (New York, NY), 1976.

Colors of the Mind: Conjectures on Thinking in Literature, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 1991.

A New Theory for American Poetry: Democracy, the Environment, and the Future of Imagination, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 2004.

Time, Space, and Motion in English Renaissance Poetry, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 2007.

Contributor to literary journals and periodicals.

SIDELIGHTS: Author and educator Angus Fletcher is professor emeritus at the City University of New York in New York City. A frequent writer on literary concepts and issues, Fletcher is the author of books on American poetry, allegory, and intellectualism and thinking in literature. In A New Theory for American Poetry: Democracy, the Environment, and the Future of Imagination, Fletcher offers a "sensitive and comprehensive study" in which he formally describes American poetry as American and not derived from English Romanticism, noted Victoria N. Alexander in Style. He also describes a new genre of poetry: the "environmentpoem," defined as independent and self-governing poems which strive to create an environment in which the poem can exist and thrive. Such poems work to bring readers into conscious awareness of their environment, where the poem lives and the poet works. "Poets of this genre are not like cartographers representing an environment as a place, so much as like choreographers representing movements in space," Alexander observed. Fletcher looks carefully at the work of poets Walt Whitman, John Clare, and John Ashbery to explore his thesis. He finds Whitman to be the inventor of the environment poem, while Clare and Ashbery were notable practitioners. "By being so pliant itself, the book bends us with brilliance toward the work of the poets it reads," commented Andrew DuBois in the Harvard Review. "Such a humble, attentive approach is only proper; many thanks to Fletcher for reshaping our critical posture." Alexander called A New Theory for American Poetry "a wonderfully nuanced examination of the nature of poetics and the poetics of nature." Fletcher "may not have explained everything about his subject, but what he has explained is enough to occupy most minds for a long time," noted DuBois. "Skillfully considerate of grammar, syntax, and style, Fletcher provides a much-needed reintroduction of poetics into scholarship," Alexander concluded. "There are few literary theorists with Fletcher's extensive and exceptional erudition, fewer still who make use of it with such grace."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Harvard Review, June, 2005, Andrew DuBois, review of A New Theory for American Poetry: Democracy, the Environment, and the Future of Imagination, p. 173.

Style, winter, 2005, Victoria N. Alexander, review of A New Theory for American Poetry, p. 501.