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.
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…
“Chinese poems reflect this deep devotion of their authors to the good of the State—their unwavering allegiance to righteousness, even when it meant demotion or exile or death.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Imagist Poets, LGBTQ+ Poets, Modernist Poets
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…
Witter Bynner:
brooklyn, santa fe, harvard university, young harvard, grenstone poems, spectrism, emanuel morgan, kiang kang-hu.
Anne Knish:
spectra hoax, arthur davison ficke, witter bynner, davenport, iowa, hudson, new york, spectrism, opus 76, free verse.
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.
