The Selected Witter Bynner: Poems, Plays, Translations, Prose, and Letters Book

A remarkably long and varied literary career is represented in this collection. Witter Bynner (1881?1968) published more than thirty books, but for various reasons his accomplishments have been overlooked and undervalued. His focus on non-European cultures, particularly that of China, his orientation to the American Southwest, where he lived from 1922 until his death, his support of minorities, and his homosexuality, the very qualities that put him outside the mainstream during his lifetime, today make his work and career particularly interesting. Bynner is perhaps best known for his translations of Chinese literature. These are represented in Kraft's anthology along with selections from Bynner's influential translation of Euripides' Iphigenia in Tauris, his plays, and especially his varied verse, including the poems that he and his friend Arthur Davison Ficke published under the names of Emanuel Morgan and Anne Knish as "Spectrist" verse. Among the prose included here are essays on subjects ranging from Henry James to Pueblo Indian ceremonial life. Bynner numbered among his acquaintances an array of notables that included Igor Stravinsky and Cecil B. DeMille, D. H. Lawrence and Khalil Gibran, and his witty letters to and about these people make delightful reading.Read More