F.S. Flint
born Dec. 19, 1885, London, Eng.
died Feb. 28, 1960, Berkshire
English poet and translator, prominent in
the Imagist movement (expression of precise
images in free verse), whose best poems
reflect the disciplined economy of that
school.
The son of a commercial traveler, Flint
left school at the age of 13 and worked at a
variety of jobs. At the age of 17 his
reading of a volume by the 19th-century
Romantic poet John Keats fired his
enthusiasm for poetry. Two years later he
became a civil-service typist and enrolled
in a workingman’s night school. He learned
French and Latin (eventually he mastered 10
languages) and after World War I rose to
become a high official in the Ministry of
Labour.
Flint’s first volume of poetry, In the
Net of the Stars (1909), was a collection of
love lyrics, clearly showing the influence
of Keats and his contemporary Percy Bysshe
Shelley. The same year, he and a group of
young poets, all dissatisfied with the state
of English poetry, began working to
overthrow conventional versification and to
replace strict metre with unrhymed cadence
(a term he appropriated). His friendship
with the English poet T.E. Hulme and the
American poet Ezra Pound helped him to
develop further his own distinctive poetic
style. Cadences (1915) and Otherworld (1925)
established him as a leading member of the
Imagists.
After the death of his wife in 1920,
Flint suddenly stopped writing. He did,
however, continue to produce translations,
mostly of French works.
