Word, Colour and Sound: John Gould Fletcher’s Hybrid “Colour Symphonies”

Abstract

The paper undertakes as its subject the problem of complexity in the composition of a cycle of poems called “Colour Symphonies” written by an American modernist poet John Gould Fletcher in the first decades of the twentieth century. The uniqueness of composition of the entire cycle as well as its separate “colour” parts consists in combining visual representations with diverse sonic effects in a joint effort of creating in this way a singular poetic verbal equivalent. Such hybrid-like compound becomes in turn a carrier of emotional states which the poet attempts to render in successive parts of the cycle. Fletcher’s sequence of colour symphonies is a supreme example of modernist hybridity of composition so characteristic for its numerous poetic groups like for example Imagism.