BE. Witter Bynner

24. Introductions to Selected Poems (17), 1978.

a. Kraft, James. ‘Biographical Introduction’. Kraft suggests that the Spectra poems (BG6) have ‘the elliptical quality of haiku’, and that Ficke, who had found in Japanese art a ‘stylized feeling that served him for his stylized verses’, passed on to Bynner an ‘interest in the Orient’ that gave him ‘the model for his best poetry’. For Bynner himself ‘the Orient represented . . . an escape into a style of life’ that he found ‘acceptable . . . as a man and a poet’.

b. Wilbur, Richard. ‘Critical Introduction’. Includes discussion of Bynner’s debt to Buddhism, along with brief notes about In Kamakura (3g).