Poems from the Greenberg Manuscripts
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“Who was Samuel Greenberg?” editor Garrett Caples asks: “The short answer is ‘the dead, unknown poet Hart Crane plagiarized.’” In the winter of 1923, Crane was given some of Greenberg’s notebooks and called him “a Rimbaud in embryo.” Crane included many of Greenberg’s lines, uncredited and slightly changed, in his own poetry. Poems from the Greenberg Manuscripts was edited by James Laughlin, who first published it in 1939. As well as Laughlin’s original essay, Caples includes a new selection of poems from Greenberg’s notebooks, along with some of his prose. Now the work of this mysterious, impoverished, proto-surrealist American poet, who never published a word in his life, is available to a new generation of readers.
Samuel Bernard Greenberg (1893–1917) was born in the Jewish ghetto in Vienna, Austria, and settled with his family in Lower East Side of Manhattan at age seven. He contracted tuberculosis and died at twenty-three. Garrett Caples is the author of Power Ballads, Retrievals, The Garrett Caples Reader, Complications, and Quintessence of the Minor. He edits the Spotlight Poetry Series at City Lights Books. James Laughlin (1914–1997) founded New Directions in 1936 while still a student at Harvard. He wrote and compiled more than a dozen books of poetry as well as stories and essays; seven volumes of his correspondence with his authors are available from W.W. Norton.