Frank Stuart (‘F. S.’) Flint

Frank Stuart (‘F. S.’) Flint (1885–1960), English poet and translator, and civil servant, grew up in poverty – ‘gutter-born and gutter-bred’, he would say – and left school at 13. But he set about to educate himself in European languages and literature (he deeply appreciative of the French Symbolists and of Rimbaud), as well as in history and philosophy. In 1908 he started writing articles and reviews for the New Age, then for the Egoist and for Poetry (ed. Harriet Monroe). Quickly gaining in reputation and authority (especially on French literature – his influential piece on ‘Contemporary French Poetry’ appeared in Harold Monro’s Poetry Review in 1912) – he became associated with T. E. Hulme, Ezra Pound, Richard Aldington and Hilda Doolittle; and he contributed poems to the English Review (ed. Ford Madox Hueffer) and to Pound’s anthology Des Imagistes (1914). In 1920 he published Otherworld Cadences (Poetry Bookshop); and with TSE and Aldous Huxley he was one of the contributors to Three Critical Essays on Modern English Poetry, in Chapbook II: 9 (March 1920). Between 1909 and 1920 he published three volumes of poetry, though his work as essayist, reviewer and translator was the more appreciated: he became a regular translator and reviewer for The Criterion from the 1920s – and a member of the inner circle gathered round TSE – even while continuing to work in the statistics division of the Ministry of Labour (where he was Chief of the Overseas Section) until retiring in 1951. See also The Fourth Imagist: Selected Poems of F. S. Flint, ed. Michael Copp (2007).