James Elroy Flecker (1884–1915) was an English novelist and playwright. As a poet, he was most influenced by the Parnassian poets. While at Oxford he was greatly influenced by the last flowering of the Aesthetic movement there under John Addington Symonds, and became a close friend of the classicist and art historian John Beazley. From 1910 Flecker worked in the consular service in the Eastern Mediterranean. On a ship to Athens he met Helle Skiadaressi, and in 1911 he married her. Flecker died on 3 January 1915, of tuberculosis, in Davos, Switzerland but was buried in Cheltenham. His death at the age of thirty was described at the time as “unquestionably the greatest premature loss that English literature has suffered since the death of Keats”. With b/w photo of Flecker taken in 1912 in Beirut (frontispiece).