Arthur Davison Ficke



Arthur Davison Ficke (1883–1945) was an American poet and lawyer known for several books of poetry, including Sonnets of a Portrait-Painter, and for his involvement in the literary hoax of Spectrism (under the pen name of "Anne Knish"). He is also known for his relationship with Edna St. Vincent Millay.

Life
Ficke was influenced by Japanese artistic traditions in his work, which he had been familiar with since childhood; his father, an art dealer, imported Japanese art in the last decade of the 19th century, when it was extremely popular. He wrote a book on Japanese art, Chats on Japanese Prints, published in 1915.

Ficke is often considered a fairly conservative poet, sticking to traditional styles and forms during the time when modernism was dominating the world of literature and writers were using a whirlwind of experimental types of poetry. Ficke was displeased by what he saw as the inaesthetic nature of these experiments, which was the main motivation for the Spectrist hoax, intended as a send-up of these poets. Much of his early work was in traditional meter and rhyme scheme; "Sonnets of a Portrait-Painter" is an example. After the publication of Spectra, he did experiment in other forms; "Christ in the Desert" was his first more modernistic work, without traditional meter or rhyme scheme.