Poems from the Greenberg Manuscripts

by Samuel Greenberg, Garrett Caples (Editor), James Laughlin (Contributor)

“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 Manuscript 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.

Genres: Poetry

72 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1939

About the author

Samuel Bernard Greenberg was an Austrian-American Jewish poet and artist. Greenberg grew up in poverty on the Lower East Side of New York City and spent the last years of his life in and out of charity hospitals. He died of tuberculosis in the Manhattan State Hospital on Wards Island. Marc Simon writes, "Jacob and Hannah Greenberg, before coming to the new world, had lived with their family in Vienna. They had eight children; the sixth named Samuel was born in Vienna in 1893. His father supported the large family by embroidering gold and silver brocades for religious and other purposes . . . Greenberg attended public school 160 on Suffix Street at the corner of Rivington, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan."

The fullest collection of his poems is Poems by Samuel Greenberg, ed. Harold Holden and Jack McManis, New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1947.

Critics have accused Hart Crane of plagiarizing Greenberg's poem "Conduct" for his own poem "Emblems of Conduct."

Librarian note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Samuel^^^Greenberg

Reviews

[Cooper Renner · Rating 3 out of 5]

Initially I wasn’t at all sure this wasn’t a literary hoax, not least because the main text was “edited, and with an essay, by James Laughlin,” who died in 1997, though the only copyright date was 2019. But it’s legit—the new introduction reveals that Laughlin’s original work with Greenberg’s writing was published in 1939 (when Laughlin was only 25!) and a bit of internet searching adds other data. A lot of Greenberg’s poetry I skipped, and some of his prose likewise is right on the line of unintelligible. But it’s an interesting short book and makes me wonder if I want to try, one more time, to see if I can make myself read Hart Crane who apparently pilfered from Greenberg’s work.