Mr. Faust

Arthur Davison Ficke (1883-1945) was a lawyer and poet. He was born in Davenport, Iowa. After graduating from Harvard in 1904 and with a law degree from the University of Iowa, he settled into a ten-year legal practice with his father. Ficke is best remembered for three things: a correspondence and brief love affair with Edna St. Vincent Millay; a prose work which evolved from his knowledgeable collecting of Japanese prints entitled Chats on Japanese Prints (1915), and a wildly successful literary hoax which he concocted with his friend the writer Witter Bynner. In 1916, Ficke and Bynner invented a literary movement they called Spectrism complete with two fictitious poets to embody it named Anne Knish and Emanuel Morgan. Together they published Spectra, A Book of Poetic Experiments (1916), which was taken seriously for several years by an embarrassing large number of editors and poets.