Anne Knish, credited in some accounts with the dates 1916–1917, was not a historical poet in the ordinary biographical sense. She had no childhood, family, home town, education, intimate correspondence, or grave. Rather, she was a deliberately invented literary identity, one of the central masks in the Spectra hoax, a remarkable episode in American poetry during the first years of modernism. The name “Anne Knish” bel…
Compare Poets
Pick two poets who seem to have nothing to do with each other — a Gothic American and a pastoral Englishman, say — and see where the catalogue actually joins them: overlapping years, shared ground, distinctive themes, and the poems that secretly rhyme.
Poet A
Anne Knish
Poet B
Witter Bynner
Compare two related contemporaries
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Strongly related
Their work already rhymes in the catalogue. The rest of this page is the story around that rhyme.
Biography 65%
Blended 65%
Swap sides
Another related pair
Harold Witter Bynner, who published almost always as Witter Bynner and was known to friends as “Hal,” was born on 10 August 1881 in Brooklyn, New York, and died on 1 June 1968 in Santa Fe, New Mexico. His long career carried him through several distinct literary eras: the cultivated, metrically formal verse of the early twentieth century; the disruptions and provocations of modernism; the American enthusiasm for Asia…
“Whether or not the individual may form or enjoy his poetry in metrical shape, he is constantly aware of the kinship between the beauty of the world and the beauty of imaginative phrase.”
In time
Anne Knish
Witter Bynner
1881
1968
They overlapped for 2 years (1916–1917).
When Anne Knish was born, Witter Bynner was about 35.
Witter Bynner was about 36 when Anne Knish died.
On the map
About 6 km separate New York City, New York, USA from Brooklyn, New York, USA. Both have ground in New York.
Themes they return to
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
No overlapping top terms in the poem critiques — any kinship may sit in mood rather than vocabulary.
From the biographies
arthur davison ficke
spectrism
Anne Knish: spectra hoax, arthur davison ficke, witter bynner, davenport, iowa, hudson, new york, spectrism, opus 76, free verse. Witter Bynner: brooklyn, santa fe, harvard university, young harvard, grenstone poems, spectrism, emanuel morgan, kiang kang-hu.
Poems that secretly rhyme
The closest poem-to-poem matches in critique space — the sort of kinship a listener hears before the catalogue admits it.
The world around them
While their lives overlapped
Notable events from the years they were both alive.
1916
Death in Battle
1916
Discovery of Heparin
1916
Execution and Legacy
Anne Knish
Witter Bynner
Emotional landscapes
Anne Knish: Fear, Sorrow, Despair. Witter Bynner: Wonder, Longing, Spirituality.