Witter Bynner

Name: Spectra: A Book of Poetic Experiments
Author: Witter Bynner

Summary

“Spectra: A Book of Poetic Experiments”, is a work by Witter Bynner. It explores elements such as Spectric, Emanuel Morgan and Spectrist.

Quotes from Spectra: A Book of Poetic Experiments (Witter Bynner)

Witter Bynner, Spectra: A Book of Poetic Experiments

“ These spectres are the manifold spell and true essence of objects,—like the magic that would inevitably encircle a mirror from the hand of Helen of Troy.
Just as the colors of the rainbow recombine into a white light,—just as the reflex of the eye's picture vividly haunts sleep,—just as the ghosts which surround reality are the vital part of that existence,—so may the Spectric vision, if successful, synthesize, prolong, and at the same time multiply the emotional images of the reader. ”

[↩︎]

Source: Gutenberg

Witter Bynner, Spectra: A Book of Poetic Experiments

“ The rays which the poet has dissociated into colorful beauty should recombine in the reader's brain into a new intensity of unified brilliance. The reflex of the poet's sight should sustain the original perception with a haunting keenness. The insubstantiality of the poet's spectres should touch with a tremulous vibrancy of ultimate fact the reader's sense of the immediate theme.
If the Spectrist wishes to describe a landscape, he will not attempt a map, but will put down those winged emotions, those fantastic analogies, which the real scene awakens in his own mind. ”

[↩︎]

Source: Gutenberg

Witter Bynner, Spectra: A Book of Poetic Experiments

“ It may be noted that to Spectra, to these reflected experiences of life, as we perceive them, adheres often a tinge of humor. Occidental art, in contrast to art in the Orient, has until lately been afraid of the flash of humor in its serious works. But a growing acquaintance with Chinese painting is surely liberating in our poets and painters a happy sense of the disproportion of man to his assumed place in the universe, a sense of the tortuous grotesque vanity of the individual. By this weapon, man helps defend his intuition of the Absolute and of his own obscure but real relation to it. ”

[↩︎]

Source: Gutenberg

Witter Bynner, Spectra: A Book of Poetic Experiments

“ ANNE KNISH
Opus 40
I HAVE not written, reader,
That you may read. . . .
They sit in rows in the bare school-room
Reading.
Throwing rocks at windows is better,
And oh the tortoise-shell cat with the can tied on!
I would rather be a can-tier
Than a writer for readers. ”

[↩︎]

Source: Gutenberg

Witter Bynner, Spectra: A Book of Poetic Experiments

“ In its third sense, Spectric connotes the overtones, adumbrations, or spectres which for the poet haunt all objects both of the seen and the unseen world,—those shadowy projections, sometimes grotesque, which, hovering around the real, give to the real its full ideal significance and its poetic worth. ”

[↩︎]

Source: Gutenberg

Witter Bynner, Spectra: A Book of Poetic Experiments

“ It indicates our feeling that the theme of a poem is to be regarded as a prism, upon which the colorless white light of infinite existence falls and is broken up into glowing, beautiful, and intelligible hues. In its second sense, the term Spectric relates to the reflex vibrations of physical sight, and suggests the luminous appearance which is seen after exposure of the eye to intense light, and, by analogy, the after-colors of the poet's initial vision. ”

[↩︎]

Source: Gutenberg

Witter Bynner, Spectra: A Book of Poetic Experiments

“ It is the aim of the Spectric group 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. ”

[↩︎]

Source: Gutenberg

Witter Bynner, Spectra: A Book of Poetic Experiments

“ They die.
The crickets now are sleeping;
Even the leaves
Grow still.
And slowly
Out of the blankness, out of the silence
Emerges on soundless wings!
The long sweet-sloping
Rise and fall of far viol notes,—
The mad Nirvana,
The faint and spectral
Dream-music
Of my heart's desire.
EMANUEL MORGAN
Opus 29
KNIVES for feet, and wheels for a chin,
And the long smooth iron bore for a neck,
And bullets for hands. . . . And the root runs in,
The root of blood no stone can check,
From the breasts of the grinding crash of sin,
From engines hugging in a wreck. ”

Witter Bynner

Summary

Quotes from Spectra: A Book of Poetic Experiments (Witter Bynner)

Common terms

Similar works

Get perspective with Kwize: daily news enlightened by great literature