Spectra

"The authors began to be deluged with adulatory letters from the most advanced poets of our very advanced day, of whom the men naturally included to address Miss Knish, and the women Mr. Morgan. Here at last, it appeared, was the real thing - pretense stripped away, technique reduced to lowest terms, passionate beauty impaled for a marveling posterity - that ultimate method for which the poets from Homer to themselves had been so many voices crying in the wilderness. Certain poetry...
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"The authors began to be deluged with adulatory letters from the most advanced poets of our very advanced day, of whom the men naturally included to address Miss Knish, and the women Mr. Morgan. Here at last, it appeared, was the real thing - pretense stripped away, technique reduced to lowest terms, passionate beauty impaled for a marveling posterity - that ultimate method for which the poets from Homer to themselves had been so many voices crying in the wilderness. Certain poetry magazines were impressed and sought the privilege of giving the world more Spectra, not all of which have yet been printed...Probably neither of the authors were prepared for so gratifying a success. Indeed, there is no telling how far the 'movement' might have gone but for the interruption of the war, which gave 'Miss Knish' a commission as Captain Arthur Davison Ficke." -The Dial, Volume 64, January 3, 1918

THIS volume is the first compilation of the recent experiments in Spectra. 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 themethods of Futurist Painting. An explanation of the term "Spectric" will indicate something of the nature of the technique which it describes. "Spectric" has, in this connection, three separate but closely related meanings. In the first place, it speaks, to the mind, of that process of diffraction by which are disarticulated the several colored and other rays of which light is composed. 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. 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. 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.