James Elroy Flecker

The ballad is one of the oldest poetic forms in English and are simply poems or songs that tell a story. Maybe it’s because of childhood associations or that we all enjoy a cracking good story told in rhyme but as this volume demonstrates, the ballad has endless appeal....

James Elroy Flecker, linguist, scholar, critic, poet, and diplomat, like his illustrious poetic peers, Wilfred Owen and Rupert Brooke, did not survive the First World War. All three died young: Owen and Brooke in the line of battle, and Flecker in a sanatorium in Switzerland in 1915....

James Elroy Flecker was a skilled linguist and an expert translator of Latin poetry. The surviving translation consists of lines 1-19 and 264-547 from book six of the Aeneid, which describe Aeneas' encounter with Sibyl and his visit to the underworld....

The Bridge of Fire, which appeared in 1907, was Flecker's first published collection of poetry. As with Flecker's other collections, two persistent themes emerge: the poet's fascination with the glories of Grecian antiquity and his premonitions of any early demise....