Arthur Davison Ficke can best be described as a devoted practitioner of the art of poetry. He produced fifteen volumes of verse and had numerous individual poems published in a variety of periodicals. His most highly regarded work is Sonnets of a Portrait-Painter (1914), a sequence of fifty-seven sonnets that emotionally portrays the tragic course of love. Ironically this man of high aesthetic principles is probably best remembered for his role in the Spectra Hoax, a spoof on the various "schools" of modern poetry, which he perpetrated with his friend Witter Bynner.

Arthur Davison Ficke was born in Davenport, Iowa, on 10 November 1883, to Frances Davison Ficke and Charles August Ficke, a lawyer with an interest in art. Under the influence of his father and travels throughout the world with his parents, the young Ficke also developed a love for the graphic arts, and in his adult years he was...