Home > Witter Bynner

He was born in Brooklyn, New York, and brought up in Brookline, Massachusetts.

He graduated from Harvard University in 1902. Initially he pursued a career in journalism at McClure's Magazine. He then turned to writing, living in Cornish, New Hampshire until about 1915.

In 1916 he was one of the perpetrators, with Arthur Dickson Ficke , a friend from Harvard, of an elaborate attempted literary hoax . It involved a purported 'Spectrist' school of poets, along the lines of the Imagists, based in Pittsburgh. Spectra, a slim collection, was published under the pseudonyms of Anne Knish (Ficke) and Emanuel Morgan (Bynner). Marjorie Allen Seiffert , writing as Angela Cypher, was roped in to bulk out the 'movement'.

In early 1917 he with Ficke travelled to JapanJapan (, Nippon/Nihon literally "the origin of the sun") is a country in East Asia situated on a chain of islands east of the Asian continent on the western edge of the Pacific Ocean. The largest of these islands are, from north to south, Hokkaido , Honsh, possibly to escape the aftermath of the Spectra affair. It was in any case the most significant poetic exchange between the USA and Japan, until after World War IIWorld War II was the most extensive and costly armed conflict in the history of the world, involving the great majority of the world's nations, being fought simultaneously in several major theatres, and costing tens of millions of lives. The war was fough.

He had a short spell in academia in 1918/9, at the University of Berkeley. He then travelled to ChinaThis article is on the geographic and cultural entity. For other meanings, see China (disambiguation). China ( Traditional Chinese: , Simplified Chinese: , Hanyu Pinyin: Zhongguo, Wade-Giles: Chung-kuo) is a country in continental East Asia with some oute, and studied Chinese literatureAncient texts The Four Books (, Si shu) are The Great Learning (, Da Xue). The Doctrine of the Golden Mean (, Zhong Yong). The Analects of Confucius (, Lun Y), a book of pithy sayings attributed to Confucius. Mencius (, Meng Z). The Five Classics (, W jin. He subsequently produced many translations from Chinese. His verse showed both Japanese and Chinese influences, but the latter were major. Bynner became more of a modernist, perhaps in consequence, where previously he had been inclined to parody Imagism, and dismiss the orientalist pronouncements with which Ezra PoundEzra Weston Loomis Pound ( October 30 1885 November 1 1972) was a poet, musician and critic who, along with T. Eliot, was one of the major figures of the modernist movement in early 20th century poetry. He was the driving force behind several modernist mo was free.

He then settled in Santa Fe, in a steady and acknowledged homosexual relationship. He became a friend of D. H. Lawrence, and travelled with him and Frieda in Mexico; he much later in 1951 wrote on Lawrence, while he and his partner Willard Johnson are portrayed in Lawrence's The Plumed Serpent.