Bynner, Witter (1881-1968). American poet and playwright. Born in Brooklyn, NY, Bynner spent most of his childhood in Brookline, MA, and graduated from Harvard University in 1902. The same year he joined the editorial staff of McClure’s Magazine in New York City, first as an office boy and then as assistant to literary editor Viola Roseboro’. He also worked on matters pertaining to the associated book publishing firm McClure, Phillips, and Co. Bynner sent copies of Cather’s The Troll Garden (1905), published by McClure, Phillips, and Co., to Henry James, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Margaret Deland; he conveyed back to Cather James’ dismissive response about American women authors. Bynner left McClure’s in 1906 to concentrate on his poetry and sent Cather a copy of his first book of poems, An Ode to Harvard and Other Poems (1907), to which she responded graciously, but by 1915 she used his name as a shorthand for the worst of modern poetry. In 1916 with his fellow poet Arthur Davison Ficke, Bynner undertook to satirize the Imagist school of poetry by concocting a fake school of poetry, the Spectrics. Bynner assumed the persona Emanual Morgan while Ficke became Anne Knish; they maintained the façade until the 1920s. As a result of a trip to Asia in 1917 with Ficke, Bynner became interested in Chinese T’Ang Dynasty poetry and collaboratively produced a volume of translations with Kiang Kan-hum, The Jade Mountain (1929). He also continued to be a prolific author of original verse. He and Spud Johnson, his secretary and lover, traveled in the American Southwest and Mexico with D. H. and Frieda Lawrence in 1923. Bynner subsequently visited Santa Fe, NM, frequently and bought a house there in 1940. Bynner published a memoir of D.H. Lawrence, Journeys with Genius (1951). After Cather’s death, he was critical of Cather in print, and in letters he spread misinformation about her early career. From 1930, admirer Robert Hunt was his lover and personal assistant. He died in Santa Fe soon after the sudden death of Hunt.

Pound, Ezra (1885-1972). American poet and critic. Born in Hailey, ID, to Homer Loomis Pound and Isabel Weston Pound, Ezra Pound earned his PhB from Hamilton College and an MA from the University of Pennsylvania and taught Romance languages for a year at Wabash Presbyterian College before leaving for Europe in 1908, becoming an expatriate and a leading figure in the Imagist and modernist movements. Pound both published his own poetry and promoted modernist writers in publications like New Age, the Egoist, and Poetry. Pound wrote more than seventy books including, Personae (1909), Homage to Sextus Propertius (1919), Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1921), and The Cantos (1925-1962). He served as foreign advisor and editor of the Chicago-based little magazine the Dial from 1920 to 1923 and was responsible for its publication of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land in 1922. Pound supported Benito Mussolini and made pro-Fascist broadcasts in Italy starting in 1935; in 1943 he was indicted in absentia for treason. After Mussolini’s surrender in 1945, Pound was arrested, declared insane, and confined until 1958. Cather was skeptical of both Pound’s poetry and him personally.