Who is Witter Bynner?

Few readers today could respond the question, "Who is Witter Bynner?," but it is a question that can be variously and richly answered. As well known early in this century as his friends Carl Sandburg and Edna St. Vincent Millay, Bynner (1881-1968) was a poet, translator, essayist, playwright, and editor, and early supporter of A. E. Housman, O. Henry, Ezra Pound, Countee Cullen, and Langston Hughes. He wrote over twenty volumes of poetry, most of them published by Alfred A.

Knopf, and was part of the new verse movement that centered around Poetry magazine. He and a friend created the major hoax in American literature, a body of poetry written to mock the intellectual pretensions of the time that they called Spectra.