How Two Poets Fooled the World of Modernist Literature
Modernism is perhaps one of the most convoluted and influential cultural movements of all time, resulting in art, literature and music that is revered and studied to this day. However, despite the many authentic and admirable works produced as a part of modernist schools such as cubism, post-impressionism and futurism, modernism was equally full of comedy and mischief.
Take James Joyce’s Ulysses, for example. The epic novel, released at the very heart of the modernist movement in 1918-1920, is now considered one of the most important pieces of modernist literature ever written, and a perfect demonstration of the stream-of-consciousness technique, something that writers today are still attempting to emulate. Yet, for any literary nerd, the novel is equally hilarious, filled with references to masturbation, toilet humour and the most wonderful web of comical literary references to Greek mythology, Shakespeare and more.
Ulysses, therefore, captures the modernist ability to incorporate humour into the most legendary pieces of literature. Yet, before Joyce had even begun writing his novel, many writers and poets were already filling the modernist world with wonderfully silly work in the form of hoax movements and satire. One of these hoaxes, spectric poetry, would be accidentally mistaken for a real movement for almost two years. What was originally intended as nothing more than a parody of Ezra Pound’s imagism eventually resulted in a published book of almost fifty poems, a manifesto, alongside positive reviews and recognition. Its mistaken legitimacy makes for one very funny story, but also raises important questions about the nature of art critique and high culture.
What was spectrism, then? Essentially, it was born from poet Witter Bynner’s hatred of modernist literature. Bynner, watching as the English literary world became filled with strict, laughably serious schools of poetry, decided he wanted to mimic, mock and ridicule them all. To do so, he came up with a plan to play them at their own game, by creating a school of poetry that was so absurd that surely no one would believe it to be real.
But they did.
After tricking a group of friends at a ballet about the existence of ‘spectrism’ – the name creatively stolen from the ballet itself – Bynner recruited his literary friend Arthur Davison Ficke to bring the joke into reality. It was simply mere entertainment for the two men, the pair of them getting royally inebriated, locking themselves in a hotel room and producing a manifesto across a period of ten days. When providing the completed manifesto to his publisher, Bynner was sure he’d recognise that it wasn’t sincere. Instead, however, his publisher became the first victim of the spectric hoax; he believed it to be real.
Despite being eventually allowed in on the laughs, the publisher still allowed Bynner and Ficke to release Spectra: A Book of Poetic Experiments in late 1916, under the pseudonyms Emmanuel Morgan and Anne Knish. The preface claimed that the pair wanted to ‘to push the possibilities of poetic expression into a new region, to attain a fresh brilliance of impression by a method not so wholly different from the methods of Futurist Painting.’
Yet, whilst they maintained a serious tone throughout the beginning of the book, the poems, each entitled Opus [No.], where almost always direct parodies of imagist works, or simply extended metaphors for masturbation and equally vulgar themes. Anne Knish’s Opus 76, for example, directly parodies Amy Lowell’s imagist poem, The Bombardment, which describes the effects of a bombardment on a city in and its people. In Knish’s work, though, the earthly war of Lowell’s poem becomes one of a dreamy world filled with ‘grey stars’ and ‘green bubbles’, and ends on the deliberately ridiculous line ‘I shall have to follow my roof into the war.’
Both Bynner and Ficke were convinced that the literary community would immediately see through their hoax. Consequently, they were equally as shocked as amused when the book was accepted as legitimate and gained a rather sizable amount of media attention. Whilst some reviews were slightly unfavourable, all of their critics seemed to have well and truly fallen for the joke, critiquing the poetry collection as though it was intended as a genuine addition to the modernist literary realm. In a particularly entertaining turn of events, Bynner was even asked by The New Republic to critique the collection himself; everyone was, of course, still unaware that he was behind Morgan’s poetry. Bynner, seeing his opportunity to continue the amusement, gave Spectra a marvellous review and seized the opportunity to further criticise imagism.
The hoax then lingered for over a year. As was the tradition with modernist poetry, multiple magazines began accepting submissions from the ‘Spectric School of Poetry’. Additionally, Bynner and Ficke convinced a third poet, Marjorie Allen Seiffert, to join their movement and write under the pseudonym, Elijah Hay. By the beginning of 1918, spectric poetry had been featured across several publications, often alongside the exact work it was spoofing.
Bynner and Ficke had more than proven their point: they’d successfully demonstrated that anything (even drunken creations about pleasuring oneself) could be passed off as high culture if you tried hard enough. Eventually, seeing no reason to continue their inside joke, Bynner admitted their authorship of Spectra. The reactions ranged from shocked to not quite so shocked, yet many poets actually expressed their utter confusion that such admirable work was, in fact, an intricate and long-standing prank.
Even today, some critics agree that the poetry of ‘Morgan’ and ‘Knish’ was better than anything that Bynner and Ficke wrote under their own names. Humorously, spectrism has become their legacy. However, whilst nowadays we can look back on the work featured in Spectra and recognise its insensibility, perhaps the debacle makes a very important point about the ultimate fruitlessness of art critique and commentary. If Spectra – a poetry collection that could be likened to two friends laughing over the most foolish crudity – was accepted as a legitimate school of poetry for almost two years, then perhaps its existence proves that no one is truly equipped to say what constitutes ‘good’ and ‘bad’ art.
Written by Erin Lister
Erin is a recent English graduate, currently living in Manchester and working as a teaching assistant. She's obsessed with all things music, theatre and television and hopes to one day write about them for a living.