POETRY // THE COLORLESS WHITE LIGHT OF INFINITE EXISTENCE
by Joshua Mehigan
Like a lot of Modernist writing, Morgan’s poetry, along with that of his fellow Spectrists Anne Knish and Elijah Hay, elicited strong opinions. In 1917 The Los Angeles Graphic called “Opus 40” “Gibberish written for one purpose only—to attract attention.” Presumably this wasn’t for his use of “to be” verbs or phrase coordination. On the other hand, the poet John Gould Fletcher— then terrifically popular—praised Knish and Morgan for their “vividly memorable lines.” Presumably this also wasn’t for his use of “to be” verbs or phrase coordination.
The burden of proof would seem to lie with the proponents of Spectrism. Fortunately, the Spectrists themselves included a preface in their first anthology, Spectra: New Poems, also subtitled A Book of Poetic Experiments on the title page. In it, Knish wrote,
[the term “Spectric”] 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.
You might think this is good. You might think this is bad. Or, if you are a fan of literary arcana, you might begin to detect an essential similarity between Spectrism and the works of medieval poet Thomas Rowley, for example, or of the Gaelic bard Ossian. You might also be reminded of the discovery, in the 1790s, of Shakespeare’s great lost plays, Henry II and Vortigern and Rowena.
That is, you might remember that, like each of these, Spectra is one of the greatest hoaxes of English literature.
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