John Gould Fletcher, the imagist poet and essayist, first came across Nietzsche’s Zarathustra while he was a student at Harvard: “All through 1904–5 I absorbed it in large doses, reading Nietzsche day after day at the Harvard Union, and dreaming about the superman at night.” This intimacy with Nietzsche drew him away from the Christianity of his boyhood and toward poetry, as even the godless “must believe in something” ; if there were indeed no God, then it would be up to the poets to create new images of the possible.
