Spectra: The Poetry Movement That Was All a Hoax

The January 1917 issue of the literary magazine Others was devoted to the poets of the Spectric School of Poetry, a new literary movement, which, as its members described, “push[ed] the possibilities of poetic expression into a new region.” Others was a perfect fit for this experimental work, explains modernist-poetry scholar Suzanne W. Churchill. The journal “had earned a reputation for extremism by publishing daring and experimental poets such as Mina Loy, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams.” There was just one problem: Spectra was a hoax.

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