Samuel Bernard Greenberg (December 13, 1893 – August 16, 1917) was an Austrian-American

Jewish Jews ( he, יְהוּדִים, , ) or Jewish people are an ethnoreligious group and nation originating from the Israelites Israelite origins and kingdom: "The first act in the long drama of Jewish history is the age of the Israelites""The ...

poet A poet is a person who studies and creates poetry. Poets may describe themselves as such or be described as such by others. A poet may simply be the creator ( thinker, songwriter, writer, or author) who creates (composes) poems (oral or writte ...

and

artist An artist is a person engaged in an activity related to creating art, practicing the arts, or demonstrating an art. The common usage in both everyday speech and academic discourse refers to a practitioner in the visual arts only. However, th ...

. Greenberg grew up in poverty on the

Lower East Side The Lower East Side, sometimes abbreviated as LES, is a historic neighborhood in the southeastern part of Manhattan in New York City. It is located roughly between the Bowery and the East River from Canal to Houston streets. Traditionally an im ...

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...

and spent the last years of his life in and out of charity hospitals. He died of

tuberculosis Tuberculosis (TB) is an infectious disease usually caused by '' Mycobacterium tuberculosis'' (MTB) bacteria. Tuberculosis generally affects the lungs, but it can also affect other parts of the body. Most infections show no symptoms, in ...

in the Manhattan State Hospital on

Wards Island Randalls Island (sometimes called Randall's Island) and Wards Island are conjoined islands, collectively called Randalls and Wards Islands, in New York County, New York City,

. 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. The critical attention Greenberg has received began when the critic William Murrell Fisher (1889–1969) first showed

Hart Crane Harold Hart Crane (July 21, 1899 – April 27, 1932) was an American poet. Provoked and inspired by T. S. Eliot, Crane wrote modernist poetry that was difficult, highly stylized, and ambitious in its scope. In his most ambitious work, '' The Brid ...

11 Greenberg poems he had published in a journal called ''The Ploughshare'' in Woodstock, NY, as well as several notebooks full of poems Greenberg's brother Morris had left him. Crane retyped 41 poems on 32 pages on yellow foolscap and brought the manuscript back to New York with him on the train on January 2, 1924. Crane created a poem of his own called "Emblems of Conduct" from phrases of a poem by Greenberg called "Conduct," interspersed with lines of his own. The poem was published in Crane's first collection, ''White Buildings'', to attract attention to Greenberg. Crane was dubious about including it, but

Malcolm Cowley Malcolm Cowley (August 24, 1898 – March 27, 1989) was an American writer, editor, historian, poet, and literary critic. His best known works include his first book of poetry, ''Blue Juniata'' (1929), his lyrical memoir, ''Exile's Return ...

and

Allen Tate John Orley Allen Tate (November 19, 1899 – February 9, 1979), known professionally as Allen Tate, was an American poet, essayist, social commentator, and poet laureate from 1943 to 1944. Life Early years Tate was born near Winchester, K ...

urged him to use the poem. Other critics, however, have charged Crane with being disingenuous and having actually plagiarized Greenberg's work. A number of his poems have been set to music by the Jewish-American composer Justin Henry Rubin, one of which became a short multimedia film (2007) based on Greenberg's ''The Pale Memory'' (completed in collaboration with artist John Merigliano).

Bibliography

Posthumously published editions ''Poems from the Greenberg Manuscripts: A Selection from the Work of Samuel B. Greenberg'', James Laughlin, ed. Norfolk: New Directions, 1939. ''Poems by Samuel Greenberg: A Selection from the Manuscripts'', Harold Holden and Jack McManis, eds. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1947. ''Poems from the Greenberg manuscript: a selection of the poems of Samuel Bernard Greenberg, the unknown poet who influenced Hart Crane ; edited, with biographical notes, by James Laughlin''; New, expanded edition, edited by Garrett Caples, New York: New Directions Publishing, 2019, ''Samuel Greenberg, Hart Crane, and the Lost Manuscripts'', Marc Simon. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1978, . (Critical study with an appendix that prints Crane's typescript of forty-one poems by Greenberg.) ''Self Charm: Selected Sonnets & Other Poems'', Michael Carr and Michael Smith, eds. Cambridge, MA: Katalanche Press, 2005.

References

External links

Samuel Greenberg: American Poet

"Who Was Samuel Greenberg?" at American Poets Abroad
1893 births 1917 deaths 20th-century American poets Writers from New York City 20th-century deaths from tuberculosis Tuberculosis deaths in New York (state) {{US-poet-1890s-stub

Bibliography

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External links