Search Results

“... Two characters in pursuit of their author: such are George Neville and Witter Bynner, two chunks of raw material, anxious to tell the world about their cook. George Neville went to school with D.H. Lawrence and supposed himself the ‘original’ of George Saxton in The White Peacock: in his memoir he congratulates himself upon his useful contribution to Lawrence’s conception of true manliness ...”

“... a voluminous correspondence with figures from the literary establishment like Louis Untermeyer, Witter Bynner, Sara Teasdale. (Just then, Ezra Pound and H.D. were inventing Imagism at Harriet Monroe’s Poetry magazine, and Eliot was publishing ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, but you would never know it from this account of literary New ...”

“... good story, but without the ring of truth undoubtedly to be heard in the words Lawrence hissed at Witter Bynner, who had suggested the Lawrences stripped and took a swim with him: ‘It’s what people will think!’ The joy of flouting what people will think animated E.M. Forster’s prim persona when he imagined the young men nude in a forest pool in A ...”

“... Hopkins (sprung rhythm is not difficult to write well, but Hopkins writes it badly) and he thanks Witter Bynner for admiring ‘my poems even more than I admire them myself’. The show-off element is strong, and perhaps is as strong in the poems, but there sheer talent eclipses it. To comparative strangers he specialised in false frankness (‘Oxford ...”

“... of the emotional perversions which often accompany the self-sacrificing temperament.’ And about Witter Bynner’s companion, Willard ‘Spud’ Johnson, he writes so snidely as to appear homophobic: Johnson’s ‘title’ of secretary to Bynner, he assures us at one point, ‘was not merely honorific’, adding ...”