A self-educated man[2] born in Islington, London, Flint left school at 13 and worked in various capacities before beginning his long and distinguished career in the Civil Service in 1904.
Flint is mostly known for his participation in the "School of Images" with Ezra Pound and T. E. Hulme in 1909, of which he gave an account in the "Poetry Review" in 1909,[4] and which was to serve as the theoretical basis for the later Imagist movement (1913).
His subsequent association with Ezra Pound and T. E. Hulme, together with his deepening knowledge of innovative French poetic techniques, radically affected his poetry's development.
Hughes explaining Flint's form is best understood 'by comparing his poem ' A Swan Song'(Published in 1909 and later by Pound in 1914 in 'Des Imagistes') and, his later 'cadenced ' version thereof, ' The Swan', a poem so devoid of superfluities and cliches, to achieve that perfect chiseled beauty which is the essence of classical art'[5] In 1916 Flint was described as having ' the gift of artistic courage clothed in beauty which will help build the poetry of the future'.
Otherworld, his third and last collection, was published in 1920, its lengthy title poem responding to the desolation of the First World War in its meditations on more viable modes of existence.