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

A remarkably long and varied literary career is represented in this collection. Witter Bynner (1881-1968) published more than twenty books, but for various reasons his accomplishments have been overlooked and undervalued.
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 own 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 broad range of friends and acquaintances individuals as diverse as Igor Stravinsky and Cecil B. DeMille, D. H. Lawrence and Khalil Gibran, and his witty letters to and about these people make delightful reading.