The Last Generation: “We men of this age are rotten with book-lore and with a yearning for the past”

The Last Generation by James Elroy Flecker

TO FRANK SAVERY WHO TAUGHT, ENCOURAGED, AND REVEALED

James Elroy Flecker was born on 5th November 1884, in Lewisham, London.

Flecker does not seem to have enjoyed academic study and achieved only a Third-Class Honours in Greats in 1906.  This did not set him up for a job in either government service or the academic world. 

After some frustrating forays at school teaching he attempted to join the Levant Consular Service and entered Cambridge to study for two years. After a poor first year he pushed forward in the second and achieved First-Class honours. His reward was a posting to Constantinople at the British consulate.

However, Flecker’s poetry career was making better progress and he was beginning to garner praise for his poems including The Bridge of Fire.  Unfortunately, he was also showing the first symptoms of contracting tuberculosis. Bouts of ill health were to now alternate with periods of physical well-being woven with mental euphoria and creativity.

Before his early death he managed to complete several volumes of poetry, which he continually revised, together with some prose works and plays. It was a small canon of work but on his death on 3rd January 1915, of tuberculosis, in Davos, Switzerland he was described as unquestionably the greatest premature loss that English literature has suffered since the death of Keats.

Index of Contents

INTRODUCTION

I. AT BIRMINGHAM TOWN HALL

II. THE PROCLAMATION

III. THE MUTUAL EXTERMINATION CLUB

IV. THE EPISODE OF THE BABY

V. THE FLORENTINE LEAGUE

VI. OUTSIDE

VII. THE LAST MEN

AN ESSAY ON JAMES ELROY FLECKER

JAMES ELROY FLECKER – A SHORT BIOGRAPHY

JAMES ELTROY FLECKER – A CONCISE BIBLIOGRAPHY

THE LAST GENERATION

INTRODUCTION

I had been awake for I know not how many hours that summer dawn while the sun came over the hills and coloured the beautiful roses in my mother's garden. As I lay drowsily gazing through the window, I thought I had never known a morning so sultry, and yet so pleasant. Outside not a leaf stirred; yet the air was fresh, and the madrigal notes of the birds came to me with a peculiar intensity and clearness. I listened intently to the curious sound of trilling, which drew nearer and nearer, until it seemed to merge into a whirring noise that filled the room and crowded at my ears. At first I could see nothing, and lay in deadly fear of the unknown; but soon I thought I saw rims and sparks of spectral fire floating through the pane. Then I heard some one say, I am the Wind. But the voice was so like that of an old friend whom one sees again after many years that my terror departed, and I asked simply why the Wind had come.

I have come to you, he replied, "because you are the first man I have discovered who is after my own heart. You whom others call dreamy and capricious, volatile and headstrong, you whom some accuse of weakness, others of unscrupulous abuse of power, you I know to be a true son of Æolus, a