According to the poet William Jay Smith, there is an anecdote, perhaps apocryphal, recounting the time that a badly soused Hart Crane teetered up to Witter Bynner in Mexico, warning, “Witter Bynner, you’re going to have a bitter winter.” With regard to Bynner’s reputation as a leading literary figure, Crane’s jibe takes on the ring of prophesy: though once at the forefront of American poetry, Bynner’s verses have met with chilly regard from subsequent generations of readers and critics. Through the combined efforts of James Kraft, general editor of the five-volume Works of Witter Bynner (1978–81), the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry, and the University of New Mexico Press (located in Bynner’s adopted state of residence), a new edition may rekindle interest in the neglected writer. For The Selected Witter Bynner: Poems, Plays, Translations, Prose, and Letters, Kraft draws heavily on his earlier multi-volume set, paring down the writings to one compact compilation. But can such home-team, partisan support see Bynner through to a complete rehabilitation? For Bynner the literary figure, reinstatement seems promising; for Bynner the poet, it is somewhat more difficult to say.

As Kraft’s accompanying biography makes clear, Bynner was no wallflower. The list of his intimates and acquaintances reads like a rota of prestigious writers and artists from the early twentieth century. Wallace Stevens, Willa Cather, Mark Twain, Ezra Pound, Henry James, Mabel Dodge Luhan, Kenneth Rexroth, Carl Van Vechten, Cecil B. DeMille, Ansel Adams, John Sloan, Rockwell Kent, and a host of others either knew Bynner or corresponded with him. Edna St. Vincent Millay accepted his proposal of marriage before they both thought better of it. In 1923 he traveled with D. H. and Frieda Lawrence to Mexico and was portrayed, albeit unflatteringly, as a minor character in The Plumed Serpent, Lawrence’s novel based on that trip. Despite such august company, Bynner’s own name has fallen almost completely from the literary rolls. Part of the renowned network of artists who settled in the American southwest, he is today recognized as an editor, translator, playwright, essayist, patron of the arts, and perhaps most famously as the perpetrator, along with Arthur Davidson Ficke, of the literary hoax known as “Spectra”—recognized, that is, if one remembers him at all. It is with this sense of the vicissitudes of reputation that Kraft deftly titles his brief life of the poet: “Who is Witter Bynner?”

Born in Brooklyn and educated at Harvard, Harold (“Hal”) Witter Bynner (1881– 1968) was the first of his year to join The Advocate under the editorship of Wallace Stevens. After college and the Grand Tour, he took a job at McClure’s magazine, where he secured A. E. Housman’s first American publication and saved an O. Henry story from rejection. His first book of poetry, An Ode to Harvard (1907), published when he was twenty-six, elaborates in its long title poem the poet’s nostalgia for the Cambridge of Santayana and William James, and contains the theme that would mark much of Bynner’s later work: the “oneness” of the human spirit, an ethos gleaned from Whitman though expressed in spare, irregularly rhyming, stichic verse. Housman, another major influence on Bynner’s work, commended sections of the Ode as “really beautiful poetry.”

After McClure’s, Bynner worked as a publisher’s reader for Small, Maynard & Company and there arranged for Pound’s first U.S. volumes: Provençia (1910), Sonnets and Ballate of Guido Cavalcanti (1912), and Ripostes (1913). In addition to some eighteen books of poetry, he wrote a handful of plays and translated, at Isadora Duncan’s request, Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris. This last, brushed up under Richmond Lattimore and David Grene’s general editorship of The Complete Greek Tragedies (University of Chicago Press, 1956), abides as one of Bynner’s undiminished triumphs. Another translation, The Jade Mountain, Bynner’s renderings of Chinese poetry from the T’ang Dynasty, after the literal glosses of Kiang Kang-hu, represents perhaps Bynner’s greatest contribution to American letters. The Chinese poems demonstrate admirably Bynner’s notion of “passionate patience,” the balance in poetry between impulse and craft, between the heat of inspiration and the coolness of quiet intimacy.

It is rare to wish a biography longer than it is, yet Kraft’s life of Bynner—ninety-five pages, not counting thirty pages of photographs—stints readers on the kind of detail that would bring the poet more fully to life. Kraft tells of Bynner’s proclivity at Harvard for flamboyant, giddy behavior and of his love of the theater, yet he neglects to include Paul Horgan’s story of the time Bynner and some friends beset Sarah Bernhart’s carriage after a performance, “took the horses out of their shafts,” and processed with her through the snowy streets of Boston. Wild scenes of boyish adulation and hand-kissing ensued. Kraft also mentions D. H. Lawrence’s limning of Bynner as a secondary character in The Plumed Serpent, but nowhere does he suggest the facture of the portrait, or even provide the character’s name. In fact, as the novel and its recently published early draft make clear, Lawrence’s handling of Owen (Bynner) is less than reverent: a bit of a prig, and a pedant of Chinese culture, Owen is pelted with fruit at a bullfight by Mexican villagers, who take aim at the bald crown of his head. Such omissions from Kraft’s biography are presumably due less to a weakness for hagiography than to the fact that Who Is Witter Bynner? comprises, with some additions, a version of Kraft’s biographical essay from the 1978 Selected Poems. In preparing his essay as a separate volume, Kraft has broadened its scope to include a fuller consideration of Bynner’s writings; the biographical material, however, remains more or less unaltered. While Who Is Witter Bynner? proves a helpful companion volume to the new Selected Writings, one misses the wealth of telling particulars obviously available to a Bynner biographer that would animate its subject beyond broad psychologizing. Still, Kraft makes a convincing case for Bynner as a prominent and prolific man of letters.

But what of Bynner’s poetry? As Joan Richardson points out in her biography of Wallace Stevens, Bynner was, by 1909, “hailed both as the hope of the future for American poetry and as a foil to the decadents. Unlike Stevens, he had been successful at a life in letters. He had lectured on poetry all over the United States and had been an influential editor.” Clearly, Harmonium, at the time not yet published, has risen to settle that score. What occurred, then, to raze the reputation of a poet so highly acclaimed? To some extent, what occurred was the onset of modernism. Whereas Bynner’s style was quiet and unassuming in form and diction, a new, denser, highly allusive poetry was coming to the fore.

Richard Wilbur, a somewhat reserved supporter of Bynner’s, in his critical introduction to the 1978 Selected Poems, cites “Driftwood” as a pre-eminent example of the poet’s lyric gift:

Come, warm your hands
From the cold wind of time.
I have built here, under the moon,
A many-colored fire
With fragments of wood
That have been part of a tree
And part of a ship.

Were leaves more real,
Or driven nails,
Or fingers of builders,
Than these burning violets?
Come, warm your hands
From the cold wind of time.
There’s a fire under the moon.

This is a delicately constructed poem, one in which, to use Wilbur’s phrase, the words “prove to be working hard.” But Bynner’s fragments of driftwood, suggesting cycles of destruction and renewal, were soon obscured by the fragments of civilization that Pound began piecing into the Cantos. By the late Twenties, Kraft suggests,

he must have realized that the poetry of his friends Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens, and of T. S. Eliot, was taking over and that his lyric style was losing ground. Their work was often historical and intellectual in content … and usually not written in an easily accessible style.

For his part, Bynner, in his essay The Persistence of Poetry (1929), reviled “the countless artificers, over-cultured and jaded, who with extensive knowledge of the world’s poets … fabricate words into strained intellectualized meanings.” A line was drawn in the sand between silver and golden, between unadorned diction and the difficulties of modernism. Prominent critics leveled a steady barrage. For R. P. Blackmur, Bynner’s poems seemed “all competence and no mastery.” Allen Tate thought Bynner’s “disastrous facility … [betrayed him] into an unreadable dullness of repetition, and often into false intensities.” Writing in The New Republic, Randall Jarrell criticized in the work “a certain monotony … What one feels angry at is the automatic rhetorical romanticism.” As a practitioner of the simple lyric, Bynner was increasingly in the minority.

Kraft offers an additional reason for Bynner’s hot-and-cold reception: the appearance of Spectra in 1916. The Spectra hoax, poems published by Bynner and Arthur Davidson Ficke under the pseudonyms Emanuel Morgan and Anne Knish respectively, left a lot of readers uncertain of Bynner’s seriousness. Devised as a mock response to Amy Lowell and “the vagaries of various ‘schools’ such as the ‘Imagist,’ ‘Vorticist,’ etc.,” Bynner-Morgan’s Spectric verse slipped in under the radar of leading editors. The Little Review and Poetry each accepted poems, and the magazine Others devoted an entire issue to the Spectric School in 1917. William Carlos Williams figured among the unwitting supporters of Spectrism, and newspaper headlines heralded the arrival of the movement. The poems, each entitled “Opus” and numbered non-sequentially, display a certain energy and playfulness, as in “Opus 104”:

How terrible to entertain a lunatic!
To keep his earnestness from coming close!

A Madagascar land-crab once
Lifted blue claws at me
And rattled long black eyes
That would have got me
Had I not been gay.

As a crowning irony, The New Republic invited Bynner of all people to review the new movement for its pages. He declined, later admitting that the joke of Spectra was in the end largely on himself:

Many a discerning critic of poetry is convinced to this day that, liberated by our pseudonyms and by complete freedom of manner, Ficke and I wrote better as Knish and Morgan than we have written in our own persons. Once in a while we think so ourselves.

Bynner’s Doppelgänger, conceived as a ruse, loomed in the background of the poet’s subsequent work: Morgan’s humor and flair for absurd juxtaposition began to insinuate itself. Bynner wrote several more books as Morgan, in the end publishing one of them under his own name: the line between the “genuine” voice and the parodic grew thin.

Spectra notwithstanding, the greatest enduring influence on Bynner’s work was his interest in the poetry and culture of China. The two trips he made to that country as a young man informed his identity as a poet, until in 1918, while teaching at the University of California at Berkeley, he began what would become his greatest poetic legacy: the translation of the Chinese anthology Three Hundred Pearls of the T’ang Dynasty. The resulting volume, The Jade Mountain, took thirteen years to complete and remains one of the freshest versions of these poems in English. The following is a section from Yüan Chên’s “An Elegy,” a poem oddly absent from Kraft’s selection:

O youngest, best-loved daughter of Hsieh,
Who unluckily married this penniless scholar,
You patched my clothes from your own
    wicker basket,
And I coaxed off your hairpins of gold, to buy
    wine with;
For dinner we had to pick wild herbs—
And to use dry locust-leaves for our kindling.
… Today they are paying me a hundred
     thousand—
And all I can bring to you is a temple sacrifice.

Here is Bynner’s “passionate patience” to a tee: high-stakes emotion tempered by measured restraint.

In the way changing poetic tastes shunted his own verse aside, Bynner’s Chinese translations laid waste to those by his contemporaries (with the exception of Pound’s) and sparked such later efforts as the memorable translations of Tu Fu by Kenneth Rexroth. While there is much to reward a thoughtful reader in Bynner’s own lyrics, it is through his various personae—the T’ang poets, and in a peculiar way Morgan—that his voice continues to resonate.