Witter Bynner, widely known and acclaimed by other poets and critics during his most productive years, is little remembered in the last half of this century. An editor of poetry and fiction; a teacher; an energetic advocate of pacifism, suffrage, native Indian culture, black artists, and young writers; an amateur actor and great mimic; a personable host who opened his house regularly to artistic people of all sorts: Bynner perhaps served poetry better in his life--as a defender and patron of the arts and as a man of letters--than in his writing. Yet he did publish eighteen volumes of poetry, several verse dramas, and numerous essays on poetry and poetics. His greatest contribution to twentieth-century literature is, unquestionably, his translation of an anthology of T'ang Dynasty poems, The Jade Mountain (1929), prepared in collaboration with Chinese scholar Dr. Kiang Kang-hu.

The son of Thomas Edgarton and Annie Louise Brewer...