Poems From the Greenberg Manuscripts

There’s a small room—more like a big closet—in the Eighth Avenue offices of New Directions that houses all of its publications stretching back to the 1940s. Three years ago, I found myself there, on hands and knees, trying to locate a blue pamphlet, Poems from the Greenberg Manuscripts, like the one on my bookshelf in San Francisco. I was unsuccessful. Published in 1939, before New Directions founder James Laughlin moved his operation to Manhattan from his aunt’s barn in Norfolk, CT, Poems from the Greenberg Manuscripts likely never made it to the closet. When I returned home, the first thing I did was track down an affordable copy to send to the press.

This was not, however, an act of pure philanthropy. New Directions had begun publishing poetry pamphlets again, and my ambition was to get the press to reprint Poems from the Greenberg Manuscripts, an essay by Laughlin first appearing in New Directions in Prose and Poetry 1939 and containing the first substantial selection of the poems of Samuel Greenberg (1893-1917). In this I was successful, and Poems from the Greenberg Manuscripts was reissued last week in expanded form.

Naturally this raises the question, who was Samuel Greenberg? The short answer is “the dead, unknown poet Hart Crane plagiarized.” This statement, while irrefutably true, is controversial only insofar as Crane has been a canonical American poet since the 1930s—the first biography appeared in 1937,[1] a mere five years after his suicide—and his defenders have spilled much ink explaining away Crane’s actions in terms of “borrowing,” “rewriting,” or “influence.” Over 40 years ago, Marc Simon, editor of Crane’s Complete Poems,[2] assembled all the damning evidence in his study Samuel Greenberg, Hart Crane and the Lost Manuscripts,[3] but this was essentially a preemptive move, in order to frame the plagiarism as “the Greenberg Pattern” in Crane’s work.

But let’s be honest now, finally, in 2019. What Crane did was inexcusable. Nowadays, a career would be ruined over far less than the number of lines and images Crane appropriated from Greenberg’s then-unpublished poems.[4] One of Crane’s most famous short poems, “Emblems of Conduct,” is entirely composed of material taken from Greenberg. Crane’s depression and alcoholism—and their root in his anguish over his homosexuality—are frequently, if tacitly, offered as mitigating or even exculpating factors in his plagiarism of Greenberg, and while I’m not unmoved by this line of reasoning, the fact that Crane, a child of wealth and privilege, stole from Greenberg, an impoverished, orphaned immigrant who died of tuberculosis, arouses all of my indignation as a poet.

That said, we are faced with the overwhelming probability that Greenberg’s work would have disappeared had Crane not stolen from it. Crane himself only encountered it by chance, in 1923, while wintering in Woodstock, NY, where the art critic William Murrell Fisher showed him several of Greenberg’s notebooks; Crane borrowed them and made a typescript of his favorite poems, parts of which he would incorporate into his own work for the rest of life. Fisher, who had known Greenberg, lent these same notebooks to New Directions for Poems from the Greenberg Manuscripts and later returned them to his older brothers Daniel and Morris Greenberg, who possessed his entire fragile corpus of literary and visual art. Only through the persistence of various Crane scholars did the whereabouts of this body of work remain known, before its final disposition in the Fales Manuscript Collection at New York University in 1964. Indeed, Marc Simon himself arranged the Fales acquisition, as he details in Samuel Greenberg, Hart Crane and the Lost Manuscripts,[5] which is the only detailed account we have of Greenberg’s tragic life.

As Simon relates, Greenberg was born in the Jewish ghetto in Vienna, Austria (not “Russia or Rumania,” as Laughlin incorrectly guesses) on December 13, 1893. Greenberg and his family arrived in the United States on October 9, 1900, settling on the Lower East Side in Manhattan, where his father had preceded them and was making his living “embroidering gold and silver brocades for religious and other purposes.” In 1908, when Greenberg was 14, his mother died and he was compelled to drop out of school to work in his older brother Adolf’s “leather bag shop,” very likely where he contracted tuberculosis in 1912. His father died the following year, and Greenberg would spend the rest of his life living with one sibling or another in between stints in charity hospitals. He died on August 16, 1917, at age 23, and was buried on August 19 at Mount Hebron Cemetery in Flushing, Queens.

Greenberg’s story would have ended there, were it not for his poems, whose utter strangeness Fisher, Crane, and Laughlin found so compelling. Written in English, Greenberg’s third language, after Yiddish and German, between 1913 and 1917, in a hard-to-decipher scrawl, Greenberg’s poetry is raw and untutored; his spelling is atrocious, his grammar opaque, his sense of his frequently preferred form, the sonnet, limited to the fact of 14 lines. Yet his work is full of “lines of startling beauty and power,” in Laughlin’s phrase. Take, for example, “Science,” from his 92-sonnet sequence “Sonnets of Apology”:

Science! the smithy of the sea!
That bent anvils perfect glide
That shaded fennels yarrow wide
Swallowed pearls that marbled the checkered Dee!
Who poured the phantom, in loves comly phase
And chased huge heavens within ask of thought
Thus saved the human helpless outlook tide
The ships course, its fate will decide
Whether its safity—that of power hold!
In dreams of marines, legend base
That I in all wonderment doth hide
But eer thy unfolded—systemed way
Of long—long ago—hath begun and lured
Nature to thy heart, in patient wounded spirits clay.

I have read and loved this poem for 20 years, yet I feel little closer to understanding it. Like all of the “Sonnets of Apology,” “Science” is an apostrophe to its titular subject, a panegyric even, but the terms of this celebration are far from clear. I can understand when, for example, in another sonnet, Greenberg addresses “Memory” as “Gluttonious helium of thoughts endowment,” that is, I can at least imagine conceiving of “memory” as a sort of gas related to “thought.” But I have never been able to determine why Greenberg hails science as “the smithy of the sea.” He piles uncertainty on uncertainty, each line adding a suggestive phrase like “poured the phantom” that subverts the construction of any logical conceit. Again, I can imagine what it might mean to say science “chased huge heavens within ask of thought,” something along the lines of reducing natural phenomena to human understanding, but no meaning seems commensurate with Greenberg’s astonishing way of putting things. He is equally capable of quiet phrases that seem poignant in and of themselves, like “patient wounded spirits clay.” His lyrical power generally exceeds the occasion of the poem itself.

“Because they do not have logical structure and continuity,” Laughlin writes, “even [Greenberg’s] best poems are not completely satisfactory,” and throughout his essay, Laughlin wrestles with his enthusiasm despite Greenberg’s evident formal deficiencies: “The poetry of Greenberg is not great poetry, and it is not even important minor poetry . . . and yet . . . poetry it is, pure poetry, to an extent equaled by the work of few other writers.” That’s high praise for an expression of ambivalence, and Laughlin’s reservations stem from an outmoded critical paradigm, insofar as we’d be more apt to accept “pure poetry” as an end in itself. Laughlin astutely diagnoses Greenberg’s poetry as “surrealist,” though I don’t necessarily agree that the poetry “is almost certainly unconscious dictation.” To me Greenberg seems like a visionary poet, but also a deliberate one, the way he sets about announcing a theme and writing about it (his archives contain many pages with titles at their head, waiting for him to fill them in, and lists of ideas abound). Rather, I think Greenberg’s lyrical imagination exceeds both form and content, in a manner reminiscent of Georges Bataille’s concept of excess, irreducible to the sort of use value “meaning” would imply.

In the years since Laughlin’s pamphlet first appeared, Greenberg has been championed by surrealist-oriented poets like John Ashbery and Philip Lamantia, but there has been only one attempt at a book-length edition of Greenberg’s work, Poems by Samuel Greenberg (1947) edited by Harold Holden and Jack McManis. This book is a fatally flawed attempt to wrest conventionally grammatical poems from writing that stubbornly resists such normalizing impulses.[6] We need to hue much closer to the originals, as Michael Carr and Michael Smith did in their more recent chapbook edition, Self-Charm: Selected Sonnets & Other Poems (2005).[7] My hope is some enterprising scholar with proximity to the Fales collection will undertake the heroic task of editing a comprehensive edition of Greenberg’s poetry. In the interim, however, expanding and reissuing Laughlin’s pamphlet will hopefully reintroduce his poems into American literary consciousness. Though 80 years old, Poems from the Greenberg Manuscript is still the most serviceable single volume devoted to Greenberg, presenting the poems with only light editorial intervention and explaining the Crane scandal in a nutshell. But Greenberg ultimately deserves more, to be considered not simply as a problem for Crane scholarship but as a significant poet in his own right. There is very little in American poetry that anticipates the poems Greenberg wrote, and neither the defects of his prosody nor the difficulties he presents to our understanding diminish the power of his lyrical genius.