Poems from the Greenberg Manuscripts

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

Overview

“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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811228138
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	11/26/2019
Edition description:	Expanded
Pages:	64
Sales rank:	1,072,434
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 8.70(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

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. 

 

Editorial Reviews

"His favorite word for what he sought in poetry was “charm,” and perhaps his most pervasive quality is an alluring whimsicality...Poems from the Greenberg Manuscripts is, as Caples puts it, “a reasonable stop-gap, as a way to bring this work before a new generation of readers.” As stop-gaps go, it has a great deal to recommend it. Laughlin’s volume, with its still-vivid essay and thoughtful selection of 22 of Greenberg’s lyrics, remains a classic, and Caples has supplemented it with 10 more poems and three prose pieces, including “Between Historical Life,” Greenberg’s moving autobiographical narrative."

Jewish Review of Books - Neil Arditi

"The largely self-taught author died from TB in 1917 aged 23, but works such as this fully deserve their place in the history of modernist poetry."

The Guardian

"A strange but remarkable talent."

James Laughlin