Craft: Samuel Greenberg (Did Hart Crane plagiarize?)

There was a very obscure unpublished poet, Samuel Greenberg (1893—1917) who so impressed Hart Crane (1899—1932), that Crane took lines from as his own. The slipperiness of whether or not Crane was influenced by Greenberg or completely stole from Greenberg is evaded in the biographies of Crane.

Because of Greenberg’s completely obscurity and Crane’s status as a major figure of American modernism, the specter of Greenberg’s actual poems and influence needs a closer look.

Samuel Greenberg, self-portrait in 1916 when he was 23

Greenberg was a Jewish immigrant from the Vienna ghetto—poor, uneducated, and died horribly and early. Crane was the WASP son of a wealthy candy magnate—self-destructive, hedonistic, and also died horribly and early.

Greenberg was the sixth of eight children born in the Vienna ghetto to Jacob and Hannah Greenberg. Greenberg’s father made a living embroidering gold and silver broacdes for religious items (e.g. challah covers). He lived in poverty on the Lower East Side and was always a young person. When Greenberg was 14 his mother died and Greenberg dropped out of school to work in an older brother’s leather shop. He contracted tuberculosis there and is buried at Mount Hebron Cemetery in Flushing, Queens.