num_pages: 172
description: Middletown, Wesleyan Univeristy Press, 1961. First Edition. Signed by lead hoaxer Witter Bynner [as "Emanuel Morgan"], presented to Kenneth L. Ball, the student who first discovered his identity. Octavo, 158 pp, beige cloth with black and white imprinting, jacket. Fine book in near fine jacket showing trace edgewear. A singular copy of the book about "the hoax" . In the early years of the twentieth century, all of the arts - particularly poetry - were thriving in the midst of a post-industrial-revolution swell of excitement, creativity and new aesthetic "schools"; poetry, for its part, rolled out Imagism, Vorticism, Futurism, Chorism, and a rogue's gallery of other new poetic genres, each based on its own aesthetic theorizing. Appearing in the midst of this rather joyous and certainly passionate carnival were Emanuel Morgan, expatriate painter-turned-poet reunited with his native Pittsburgh, and his close friends and colleagues, the beautiful Hungarian poet (who wrote in Russian) Anna Knish, and barrister Elijah Hay. In 1916, Morgan and Knish took the poetry world by storm with their Spectrist school of poetry, which was based on three visions of the term - spectra, the task of the artist to perceived beauty in its component colors, rather than as the glorious white light in which it occurs naturally; the reflex vibrations of that same light which occur only within the artist, like the light phenomena in our eyes; and spectre, the yet more difficult task of uncovering the subtle, hidden spirits behind and within beauty. Morgan used regular rhymed stanza in his spectrism offerings, while Knish used only free verse, but they were attempting the same thing. The poetic world was quickly awash in discussion and analysis of the spectrist school; a few thought the intellectual foundation to be a bit pretentiously framed, others thought it strange
language: English
title: The Spectra Hoax
titlecomplete: The Spectra Hoax
genres: Poetry
ratings_count: 9
publisher: Story Line Press