Witter Bynner

Witter Bynner was born in Brooklyn and grew up with his mother in Connecticut and Massachusetts after his parents separated. At Harvard, the poet Wallace Stevens invited him onto the student literary magazine. After graduating he worked at “McClure’s Magazine” in New York and became a lecturer and campaigner for women’s suffrage.

In 1916 he and his friend Arthur Davison Ficke pulled off one of the best-known literary hoaxes in American history: under pseudonyms they invented a school of poets, the “Spectrists”, and published a volume of deliberately absurd poems that many critics took seriously. Bynner travelled to Japan and China, studied Chinese literature and with the scholar Kiang Kang-hu translated Tang dynasty poems; “The Jade Mountain” (1929) introduced many English readers to classical Chinese poetry. He also introduced Kahlil Gibran to the publisher of “The Prophet”.

In 1922 Bynner settled in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with his former student and lover Walter Willard “Spud” Johnson. The two travelled through Mexico with D. H. Lawrence, who portrayed them in his novel “The Plumed Serpent”. From 1930 Bynner lived with Robert Hunt, who remained his partner until Hunt’s death in 1964. Their home was a meeting place for artists and writers such as Willa Cather, Robert Frost and W. H. Auden.

Bynner was one of the few American writers of his time to live openly with a male partner. He died in Santa Fe in 1968, aged 86; his foundation still supports poetry today.