Harold Witter Bynner (1881 – 1968) was an American poet, writer and scholar, known for his long residence in Santa Fe, at what is now the Inn of the Turquoise Bear.

He was born in Brooklyn, New York, and brought up in Brookline, Massachusetts.

He graduated from Harvard University in 1902. Initially he pursued a career in journalism at McClure's Magazine. He then turned to writing, living in Cornish, New Hampshire until about 1915.

In 1916 he was one of the perpetrators, with Arthur Davison Ficke , a friend from Harvard, of an elaborate attempted literary hoax . It involved a purported 'Spectrist' school of poets, along the lines of the Imagists, based in Pittsburgh. Spectra, a slim collection, was published under the pseudonyms of Anne Knish (Ficke) and Emanuel Morgan (Bynner). Marjorie Allen Seiffert , writing as Angela Cypher, was roped in to bulk out the 'movement'.

In early 1917 he with Ficke travelled to Japan, possibly to escape the aftermath of the Spectra affair. It was in any case the most significant poetic exchange between the USA and Japan, until after World War II.

He had a short spell in academia in 1918/9, at the University of Berkeley. He then travelled to China, and studied Chinese literature. He subsequently produced many translations from Chinese. His verse showed both Japanese and Chinese influences, but the latter were major. Bynner became more of a modernist, perhaps in consequence, where previously he had been inclined to parody Imagism, and dismiss the orientalist pronouncements with which Ezra Pound was free.

He then settled in Santa Fe, in a steady and acknowledged homosexual relationship. He became a friend of D. H. Lawrence, and travelled with him and Frieda in Mexico; he much later in 1951 wrote on Lawrence, while he and his partner Willard Johnson are portrayed in Lawrence's The Plumed Serpent.

Works

• An Ode to Harvard and Other Poems (1907)
• Tiger (1913)
• The Little King (1914)
• The New World (1915)
• Iphigenia in Tauris (1916) translator
• Spectra (1916) poems with Arthur Dickson Ficke
• Grenstone Poems (1917) poems
• Pins for Wings
• A Canticle of Pan (1920)
• Roots (1929) poems
• The Jade Mountain (1929) translations from Chinese with Kiang Kang-hu
• Indian Earth (1929) poems
• Guest Book (1935) poems
• Selected Poems (1943)
• Take Away the Darkness (1947)
• Journey with Genius (1951) memoir of D. H. Lawrence
• New Poems (1960)
• Selected Poems (1978)

References

• The Spectra Hoax (1961) William Jay Smith
• Who Was Witter Bynner? (1995) James Kraft