The Culprits
In 1916, Witter Bynner and Arthur Davison Ficke, two classically-trained poets, decided that they were fed up with the free-form verse of modern early 20th century poetry and united to create their own phony “school” known as the Spectrists.
Bynner and Ficke were former Harvard men fond of college pranks, so they devised the Spectrists with genius and humor. Initially they began at Ficke’s house in Davenport, Iowa, but they were so consumed with the project and constantly walking around speaking in Spectrist tongues that Mrs. Ficke soon kicked them out and they had to finish the work in a hotel room.
A Book of Poetic Experiments
About a week later, fueled by satire and scotch, they had produced the volume Spectra: A Book of Poetic Experiments, as written by Emanuel Morgan and Anne Knish. Emanuel Morgan was Bynner’s poet alter ego, while Anne Knish was Ficke’s. They had opted for foreign-sounding names so as to make themselves seem more worldly, and had even imagined just what Emanuel Morgan and Anne Knish might look like, to help them channel their artistic effort.
To the conspirators’ amazement, Spectra: A Book of Poetic Experiments was accepted for publication. The book appeared on the literary scene shortly after and was a definite success, despite such lines as:
Asparagus is feathery and tall/And the hose lies rotting by the garden-wall.
The Spectra Sensation
Fellow poets such as Amy Lowell and William Carlos Williams felt that the Spectrists were quite talented, and Harriet Monroe, editor of the influential magazine Poetry accepted five of their works. The duplicitous duo had decided that Pittsburgh was where Morgan, Knish, and Spectrism lived, and numerous fan letters arrived in that city—care of a Pittsburgh friend of Bynner’s who had been let in on the secret.
The Spectra movement did so well that Bynner and Ficke expanded it to include Marjorie Seiffert, another poet who chose to write under the name Elijah Hay. Elijah’s unique talent was also well-received, and the Spectra school carried on with its newest member.
Ficke then went to serve in World War I while Bynner remained in the United States, and it began to be rumored that Spectrism was a fake. Marjorie Seiffert a/k/a Elijah Hay hinted that Bynner’s having too much fun with the joke might have drawn extra scrutiny, since he would always bring up the Spectrists at any possible opportunity and try to initiate debate.
The Truth Comes Out
When confronted at a lecture in 1918, Bynner admitted to the hoax. It was rumored that the man who asked him to publicly confess was from the University of Wisconsin, where the Wisconsin Literary Magazine had just published a spoof of the spoof entitled the Ultra-Violet School of Poetry, with its main founders Manual Organ and Nanne Pish.
The revelation caused some outrage and didn’t win Bynner and Ficke many friends, although Alfred Kreymborg, editor of the literary journal Others, quipped that while the poems had been a joke, they were still an improvement on anything Bynner and Ficke had previously come up with. Of course, Kreymborg had also claimed to Bynner and Ficke—before the truth came out—that he had personally met Anne Knish and she was gorgeous.
Though Bynner and Ficke eventually emerged from the Spectra spoof and continued their respective careers, Bynner did note that Emanuel Morgan "stayed" with him and kept influencing his later poetry. Perhaps in joking around and trying to conjure deliberately bad verse, both men found a freer form of expression that might have had some intriguing quality after all.
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The Works of Witter Bynner: Light Verse and Satires – Introduction by William Jay Smith (Farrar Straus Giroux, New York)
Spectra: A Book of Poetic Experiments by Anne Knish and Emanuel Morgan - (full text as originally published by Mitchell Kennerley, 1916)
