William Rose BenÉt was born at Fort Hamilton, New York Harbor, February 2, 1886. He was educated at Albany Academy and graduated from Yale in 1907. After various experiences as free-lance writer, publisher’s reader, magazine editor and second lieutenant in the U. S. Air Service, BenÉt became the Associate Editor of the New York Post’s Literary Review in 1920.

The outstanding feature of BenÉt’s verse is its extraordinary whimsicality; an oriental imagination riots through his pages. Like the title-poem of his first volume, Merchants from Cathay (1913), all of BenÉt’s volumes vibrate with a vigorous music; they are full of the sonorous stuff that one rolls out crossing wintry fields or tramping a road alone.

But BenÉt’s charm is not confined to the lift and swing of rollicking choruses. His The Falconer of God (1914), The Great White Wall (1916) and The Burglar of the Zodiac (1918) contain decorations as bold as they are brilliant; they ring with a strange and spicy music evoked from seemingly casual words; they glow with a half-lurid, half-humorous reflection of the grotesque. There are times when BenÉt seems to be forcing his ingenuity. The poet frequently lets his fantastic Pegasus run away with him, and what started out to be a gallop among the stars ends in a scraping of shins on the pavement. But he is saved by an acrobatic dexterity even when his energy betrays him.

Moons of Grandeur (1920) represents the fullest development of BenÉt’s unusual gifts; a combination of Eastern phantasy and Western vigor.