Arthur Davison Ficke was born at Davenport, Iowa, November 10, 1883. He received his A.B. at Harvard (1904), studied for the law and was admitted to the bar in 1908. In 1919, after two years’ service in France, he gave up his law practice and devoted himself to literature exclusively.

Ficke is the author of ten volumes of verse, the most representative of which are Sonnets of a Portrait Painter (1914), The Man on the Hilltop (1915) and An April Elegy (1917). In these, the author has distilled a warm spirituality, combining freshness of vision with an intensified seriousness.

Having been an expert collector and student of Japanese prints, Ficke has written two books on this theme. His intellectual equipment is reinforced by a strong sense of satire. Writing under the pseudonym “Anne Knish,” he was one of the co-authors (with Witter Bynner) of Spectra (1916), which, caricaturing some of the wilder outgrowths of the new poetry, was taken seriously by a majority of the critics and proved to be a brilliant hoax.