Poems from the Greenberg Manuscripts

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 Greenbergs notebooks and called him a Rimbaud in embryo. Crane included many of Greenbergs 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 Laughlins original essay, Caples includes a new selection of poems from Greenbergs 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.