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.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Imagist Poets, LGBTQ+ Poets, Modernist Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Longing, Spirituality
Emanuel Morgan occupies one of the most unusual positions in American literary history: he was a poet who never existed in the ordinary biographical sense, yet whose poems, reputation, controversies, and afterlife have proved remarkably real. The dates commonly attached to him, 1916–1917, refer not to the span of a human life but to the brief public career of a deliberately invented authorial persona. “Emanuel Morgan…
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Imagist Poets, Light Verse Poets, Modernist Poets, Symbolist Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Spirituality, Longing
