Witter Bynner

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Witter Bynner

Witter Bynner (born August 10, 1881 in New York ; died June 1, 1968 in Santa Fe , New Mexico ) was an American poet.

Life

Bynner grew up in New England and studied at Harvard University under George Santayana and Josiah Royce, among others . In 1902 he received his BA summa cum laude there . During his student days, at the invitation of Wallace Stevens , he began to write articles for the Harvard Advocate , the university's literary magazine, and soon submitted poetry in addition to journalistic work. His first volume of poetry, An Ode to Harvard and Other Poems , appeared in 1907 as a result of his appointment as the official poet of the Phi Beta Kappa section of the university. After graduating, he began a journalistic career at McClure's Magazine , but settled in Cornish, New Hampshire in 1907 so that he could devote himself to his writing ambitions in relative isolation.

He only achieved greater fame as the author of a large-scale literary fraud . To prove that literary critics attached more importance to the categorization of lyric “schools” than to poetry itself, he started the movement of “spectralism”, which was designed as a parody of modernist movements such as imagism and vorticism . Under the pseudonym Emanuel Morgan , he wrote the volume Spectra: A Book of Poetic Experiments, which was set up as an anthology and manifesto of this new school of poetry , in 1916 together with his friend from university and poet Arthur Davison Ficke (who went under the pseudonym Anne Knish ) . The poetry of spectra, according to Morgan and Knish alias Bynner and Ficke, tells the mind of the " diffraction that fanned out the rays of color and other rays that make up light," and leaves the objects of the visible as well as the invisible The world lights up for the poet in "after-colors", as if his eye had previously been exposed to an intense light. With these vague guidelines, Bynner composed orphic odes like the following:

If I were only dafter
I might be making hymns
To the liquor of your laughter
And the lacquer of your limbs.

Bynner and Ficke not only managed to warm well-known poets such as Edgar Lee Masters and William Carlos Williams to spectrism, but were also able to publish several spectristic poems in leading modern magazines such as Poetry and The Little Review , and published reviews of the volume themselves and even gave lectures in which they explained and defended the method of spectralism in front of a bona fide audience. It was not until 1920 that they let the hoax blow and pleaded guilty to having invented spectralism themselves.

In the following years Bynner began to occupy himself intensively with Far Eastern poetry, visited Japan and China and also learned the Chinese language and writing. In 1929, after ten years of preparatory work, The Jade Mountain (" The Jade Mountain ") was published, a translation of Chinese poetry, primarily of the Tang Dynasty . This achievement has perhaps received a wider reception than Bynner's “own” poetry and is still considered a milestone in the translation of Chinese literature, which is particularly difficult due to the ideogrammatic character of Chinese poetry.

In 1922, Bynner settled in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he played the central figure in the city's literary life until his death. The numerous celebrity guests he received on his estate included DH Lawrence , Willa Cather , Robert Frost , WH Auden , Christopher Isherwood , Carl van Vechten and Thornton Wilder . He was apparently briefly engaged to Edna St. Vincent Millay in 1921, but soon he made no secret of his homosexuality . From 1930 he was in a steady relationship with his friend Robert Hunt, who was 25 years his junior. When Bynner became physically weaker and blind in later years, Hunt cared for him sacrificially, but Hunt died of complications from his alcoholic illness in 1964. Shortly afterwards, Bynner suffered a stroke and was paralyzed for the last four years of his life.

In 1962 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters .

plant

Individual works

Work editions

  • The Works of Witter Bynner . 5 volumes. Edited by James Kraft. Farrar Straus Giroux, New York 1978-1981.

Secondary literature

  • Robert Lindsay: Witter Bynner: A Bibliography. University of New Mexico Press, Santa Fe 1967.
  • James Kraft: Who Is Witter Bynner? A biography. University of New Mexico Press, Santa Fe 1995, ISBN 0826316263 .
  • William Jay Smith: The Spectra Hoax Wesleyan University Press, Middletown CN 1961. #

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Members: Witter Bynner. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed February 20, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Bynner, Witter
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American poet
DATE OF BIRTH August 10, 1881
PLACE OF BIRTH New York City
DATE OF DEATH June 1, 1968
Place of death Santa Fe , New Mexico