Читать книгу Constructing the Self. Essays on Southern Life-Writing онлайн

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Waldemar Zacharasiewicz analyzes John Gould Fletcher’s autobiography Life Is My Song (1937) in which the southern poet and essayist narrates his efforts to establish a literary career in the South and in Europe, where he lived as an American expatriate for years. In Italy, Paris and England, Fletcher spent several years writing poetry for Imagist anthologies in the company of fellow-poets like Ezra Pound, H. D. and especially Amy Lowell. Always oscillating between two worlds and multiple views, in his autobiography Fletcher presents his self-portrait as a poet constantly searching for a “stable identity.” His was a “troubled career” with “continual efforts to gain recognition as a poet.” But his autobiography, according to Zacharasiewicz, “includes a pattern of self-enquiry” in which the poet reveals his constant changes of residence, opinions of literary friends, as well as his constant revisions of earlier ideas and positions. His involvement in the Agrarian movement, his association with the Fugitives and his defense of “the values of the South only represented a temporary stance of a self that was almost habitually revisioning himself.” Fletcher was a cosmopolitan who explored the self, his region and the wider world, never quite at home anywhere and with bouts of manic depression that led him to forge and destroy significant friendships. If his poetic work sounds like a musical symphony, his autobiography represents, in Zarachasiewicz’s view, the true song of his life and his effort to construct a sense of self shaped by his travels and literary connections in Europe and the American South.