Arthur Davison Ficke Poet Joker Lawyer

Arthur Davison Ficke

Arthur Davison Ficke liked precision. The feel of a line snapping into rhythm. A rhyme that hit clean. He didn’t chase chaos—he tamed it. Some called him old-fashioned. Some called him a master. Either way, he stood out—a poet from the Iowa plains who wrote like a man from another century.

 He grew up in Davenport, born in 1883 to money and culture. His father was a lawyer and art collector; his mother sharp and literary. The house smelled of books and Japanese prints. While other kids were climbing trees, Ficke was memorizing sonnets. “The law,” he said later, “is the prose of life. Poetry is the appeal.”

 

At Harvard, he studied under William James, traded poems with Witter Bynner, and learned how words could turn philosophical and dangerous at the same time. Then, back to Iowa. Law school. Courtrooms. Briefs by day, poetry by night. He wrote like a man with two hearts—one bound to duty, one drunk on beauty. “The secret joy of writing,” he once said, “is that it never quite obeys you. You aim for truth and end up confessing something else.”

 

His early books were careful, polished things—From the Isles, The Happy Princess, Sonnets of a Portrait-Painter. He wrote about art, love, and the uneasy grace of seeing clearly. “There are years that ask questions,” he wrote, “and years that answer.” Critics praised him for form, scolded him for restraint. He didn’t care. “I’ll write it clean,” he told a friend, “even if the world’s gone dirty.”

 Ficke hung around a strange crowd. George Cram Cook, Susan Glaspell, Floyd Dell—the Davenport gang. They were restless, brilliant, and half-crazy with ambition. Cook and Glaspell ran off to the Provincetown Players. Dell lit fires in Greenwich Village. Ficke stayed home, tapping out perfect lines while everyone else screamed for revolution. Dell joked that Ficke “argued for the sonnet like a preacher for salvation.” Ficke laughed. “Let them have chaos. I’ll keep the music.”

 

Arthur Davison Ficke

Then came the prank. In 1916, Ficke and Bynner messed with the literary world. They invented fake names—Ficke as “Anne Knish,” Bynner as “Emanuel Morgan.” Wrote wild, nonsensical poems. Called it Spectra: A Book of Poetic Experiments. Claimed it was the start of a new art movement. Critics swallowed it whole. “If bathing were a virtue, not a lust, I would be dirtiest,” one of Ficke’s fake poems declared.

 Reviewers called it visionary. One magazine said Spectrism “gave form to the invisible pulse of the modern mind.” Ficke couldn’t believe it. “We were joking,” he said, “but the joke was on us. We created what we meant to destroy.” For two years, he and Bynner played along, sending letters as their pseudonyms, writing essays about imaginary artistic theories. When they finally revealed the truth, people were furious. Ficke just shrugged. “In laughing,” he said, “I learned.”

 

The hoax freed him. His later poems—The Secret, Tumultuous Shore—had more air, more bite. “To speak with rhythm,” he wrote, “is to give chaos a measure.” He’d mocked modernism, then stolen its thunder. “You can’t parody what you don’t understand,” he told a reporter. “I understood them too well.”

 

Outside poetry, he was obsessed with Japanese art. His father’s collection got under his skin early. He wrote books about it—Twelve Japanese Painters, Chats on Japanese Prints. He said a print was “a poem that forgot its words.” That idea changed him. His poems became leaner. More space. More silence. “In a Japanese print,” he wrote, “you learn how to stop before perfection. The pause becomes the soul.”

 

During the war, Ficke left Iowa and joined the Army’s ordnance department. He rose to lieutenant colonel. “I have seen the machinery of death,” he wrote, “and the poetry of its motion.” After that, he quit law for good. Lived in Boston. New York. Santa Fe. Always writing. Always the outsider. Too modern for the old guard, too formal for the new one.

 

Critics split on him. Some said he was passe. Others called him “the last romantic with modern nerves.” Floyd Dell—his old friend—later admitted that Ficke wrote “the kind of poems that last quietly while louder ones die.” One reviewer said his work “had the polish of marble and the pulse of blood.” Ficke’s response was simple: “Poetry doesn’t age. It either breathes or it doesn’t.”

 

He didn’t care about fame. “Poetry is a habit of breathing,” he said. Even when throat cancer took his voice, he kept writing—whispered lines, scrawled scraps. His last book, Tumultuous Shore, came out three years before he died in 1945. One line lingered: “Time is a trick of light. We are already gone, and still the sun paints us as if we were eternal.”

 

Among the Davenport writers, he was the quiet rebel. Cook and Glaspell built a theater. Dell broke politics. Ficke broke form from the inside. His rebellion came in rhyme; his weapon was irony. The prank became prophecy. “Every joke,” he once said, “is a truth that slipped its leash.”

 

He believed art had to lie a little to tell the truth. “All art,” he wrote, “is a mask that tells the truth.” Then he smirked, as if to say he’d been wearing one the whole time. That’s the paradox of Arthur Davison Ficke. He didn’t just write in form. He fought inside it. And somehow, he won.