Witter Bynner was born at Brooklyn, New York, August 10, 1881. He was graduated from Harvard in 1902 and has been assistant editor of various periodicals as well as adviser to publishers. Recently, he has spent much of his time lecturing on poetry and travelling in the Orient.

Young Harvard (1907), the first of Bynner’s volumes, was, as the name implies, a celebration of his alma mater. The New World (1915) is a much riper and far more ambitious effort. In this extended poem, Bynner sought—almost too determinedly—to translate the ideals of democracy into verse. Neither of these volumes displays its author’s gifts at their best, for Bynner is, first of all, a lyric poet. Grenstone Poems (1917) and A Canticle of Pan (1920) reveal a more natural singing voice. Bynner harmonizes in many keys; transposing, modulating and shifting from one tonality to another. This very ease is his chief defect, for Bynner’s facility leads him not only to write too much but in too many different styles. Many of his poems seem like sounding-boards that echo the tones of every poet except the composer of them. Instead of a fusion of gifts we have, too often, a disintegration.

When Bynner is least dexterous he is most ingratiating. When he does not try to sound the whole gamut of modern poetry from the lyrics of A. E. Housman to the attenuated epigrams of Ezra Pound, he can strike his own note with clarity and precision. Even in The Beloved Stranger (1919), where the borrowed accents of his alter ego are only too apparent, one is arrested by lines of musical charm and fluency.

Under the pseudonym “Emanuel Morgan,” Bynner was coauthor with Arthur Davison Ficke (writing under the name of “Anne Knish”) of Spectra (1916). Spectra was a serious burlesque of some of the extreme manifestations of modern poetic tendencies—a remarkable hoax that deceived many of the radical propagandists as well as most of the conservative critics.