Biography
Other info : Bibliography
Harold Witter Bynner (August 10, 1881 – June 1, 1968) was an American poet, writer and scholar, known for his long residence in Santa Fe, New Mexico, at what is now the Inn of the Turquoise Bear.
Early life
Bynner was born in Brooklyn, New York, and brought up in Brookline, Massachusetts. He graduated summa cum laude from Harvard University in 1902. While at Harvard, he was invited to join the student literary magazine, The Advocate, by Wallace Stevens.
Initially he pursued a career in journalism, and edited McClure's Magazine for four years. He then turned to writing, living in Cornish, New Hampshire until about 1915. He was selected as the Phi Beta Kappa poet in 1907 with what became his first book of poems, Young Harvard.
In 1916 he was one of the perpetrators, with Arthur Davison Ficke, a friend from Harvard, of an elaborate literary hoax. It involved a purported 'Spectrist' school of poets, along the lines of the Imagists, based in Pittsburgh. Spectra, a slim collection, was published under the pseudonyms of Anne Knish (Ficke) and Emanuel Morgan(Bynner). Marjorie Allen Seiffert, writing as Elijah Hay, was roped in to bulk out the 'movement'.
In early 1917 he traveled to Japan with Ficke.
In New York, Bynner was a member of The Players club, the Harvard Club, and the Mac Dowell Club. In San Francisco, he joined the Bohemian Club.
Bynner had a short spell in academia in 1918-1919 during World War I, at the University of California, Berkeley as Professor of Oral English. There, he composedCanticle of Praise and taught classes in poetry and verse writing. He was forced to leave after serving alcohol to freshmen during Prohibition. He moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1922 where he and his partner, Robert Hunt, entertained artists and literary figures like D.H. Lawrence, Georgia O’Keeffe, Carl Sandburg, Ansel Adams, Willa Cather, Igor Stravinsky, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Robert Frost, W. H. Auden, Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood, Carl Van Vechten, Martha Graham, and Thornton Wilder.
Bynner traveled to China, and studied Chinese literature. He subsequently produced many translations from Chinese. His verse, which had initially showed the influence of poets like A.E. Housman, began to evince both Japanese and Chinese influences, but the latter were major. Bynner became more of a modernist in consequence, where previously he had been inclined to parody Imagism, and dismiss the orientalist pronouncements with which Ezra Pound was free.
In 1972, the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry was founded through a bequest from Bynner. It makes grants to perpetuate the art of poetry, primarily by supporting individual poets, translations, and audience development. Since 1997, it has funded the Witter Bynner Fellowship, the recipient of which is selected by the U.S. Poet Laureate.
A Witter Bynner Poetry Prize was established by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1980 to support young poets. It was discontinued in 2003.
