Although the author of only a small body of poems, F. S. Flint had a major impact on modern poetry. In the decade from 1909 to 1919, Flint was the leading popularizer of French poets, poetic forms, and critical theories in British journals. His dissatisfaction with nineteenth-century, particularly Georgian, poetry prompted his involvement in the experimentation of the imagist movement and his formulation of a theory of unrhymed cadence as the appropriate modern poetic meter.

Born in Islington in 1885, Frank Stuart Flint was unable to attend school beyond the age of thirteen and a half due to the extreme financial need of his family. Throughout his teens, Flint worked a variety of odd jobs, none of which foreshadowed his literary career; it was not until after qualifying for a civil-service job as a typist in 1904 that he was able to continue his formal education in a workingman's night school. His...