Mock Modernism by Leonard Diepeveen

Author:Leonard Diepeveen [Diepeveen, Leonard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ART015100, LIT004120, SOC000000
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Published: 2014-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

Anne Knish and Emanuel Morgan [Arthur Davison Ficke and Witter Bynner], “Preface” to Spectra. A Book of Poetic Experiments

(New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1916), ix–xii.

The work of poets Arthur Davison Ficke and Witter Bynner, Spectra was the most successful literary hoax of modernism. The editors of the Little Review, Poetry, The Forum, and Others were all taken in, and it was seriously discussed in Lloyd Morris’s 1917 The Young Idea (the periodical history of Spectra can be found in Suzanne Churchill’s “The Lying Game: Others and the Great Spectra Hoax of 1917”). In a spectacularly self-referential performance of log-rolling, Witter Bynner (writing under the name Witter Bynner) reviewed Spectrism in the November 1916 New Republic, giving it a mixed endorsement – not too pleased with Spectra’s theory, which he described as “heavily presented by Anne Knish as if she were a graduate of some German university.” Bynner ended the review with a coyness that he must have found delicious: “But, whether or not there be meaning or magic in the book, I can promise that there is amusement in it and that it takes a challenging place among current literary impressionistic phenomena.”

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