Angus Fletcher

1930 - 2016
Fletcher, Angus – died on November 28, in Albuquerque, NM. Born on June 23, 1930, he grew up mainly in East Hampton, Long Island, and in New York City. His father, Sir Angus Somerville Fletcher, born in South Africa to Scottish parents, d. 1960, was for many years director of the British Library of Information in New York; his Scottish-born mother, Helen Stewart Fletcher, d. 1984, became a noted painter. Fletcher gained a B.A. and M.A. from Yale University (1950, 1952), a Diplôme d'Hautes Études from the University of Grenoble (1951), and a Ph.D. in English Literature from Harvard University (1958). He went on to teach at Columbia University, UCLA, SUNY Buffalo, Cornell University, and lastly at Lehman College and the Graduate Center, CUNY. His first book, "Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode," published in 1964 and still in print, became a classic of twentieth- and indeed twenty-first century literary criticism, touching writers and scholars in myriads of fields. It was followed by important books on the poetry of Edmund Spenser and John Milton, and the 1991 "Colors of the Mind: Conjectures on Thinking in Literature," whose essays range from ancient philosophy to modern poetry and film. "A New Theory for American Poetry: Democracy, the Environment, and the Future of the Imagination," published in 2004, won the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism. "Time, Space, and Motion in the Age of Shakespeare" came in 2007. His last book, published in 2016, was "The Topological Imagination: Spheres, Edges, and Islands." Angus Fletcher will be remembered as one of the most spirited, learned, unpredictable, and powerfully original literary thinkers of his generation. He studied the urgent, sometimes compulsive shapes of human making, its temples and labyrinths, ranging from the most minute verbal paradoxes to our largest cosmic designs; he studied the changing horizons of human thought. He was a scholar of wonders, of strange things hidden in plain sight. In his later work, bridging the languages of poetry and science, he looked deeply into the question of how we must imagine the earth, and life on earth, knowing that ""the psyche is an integral part of the world out there."" Fletcher was also, as a friend wrote, ""a magically gifted teacher in whose presence we hear what thinking feels like."" He is survived by his wife, Michelle Scissom-Fletcher.