Brookhaven, NY

Aug. 25 '26

Dear Mr. Erskine,

I just received your note asking for the letter concern-
ing the Greenberg matter yesterday morning. I noted that
it was dated the 19th and am at a loss to account for its
this
delay in reaching me. I hope it is not too late in reaching
you.

I have not had time, naturally, to be very careful in
writing the enclosed letter for publication in your column -
and am sorry for that. However, you are free to make any
changes and corrections you think advisable. I hope it is
something of the kind of thing you wanted.

Brookhaven, NY

Oct. 21 '36

Dear Mr. Warren,

In one of your letters to me during the past months
you mentioned your interest in the biography I am writing
of Hart Crane and the possibility of publishing a chapter of
it in your magazine. I am wondering if you would care to
use such material in your Winter or Spring issue?

I have one chapter, the fourth, which I think would
be especially adaptable for separate publication. It deals
with the year 1920-22 and describes the evolution of his
poetic style from the comparative immaturity of "Black Tam-
bourine" up to the composition of "Fau stus & Helen", outlining
his debt to the Elizabethans, his reactions to Eliot (in de-
tail) and the modern French poets, both Decadent and Dadaist.
It describes also his reactions toward the expatriate movement
of 1921, which are very interesting, esp. the quotes from his
letters on the subject; also his life in Cleveland and the
circle of friends - William Lescze, the architect, William S.
Sommers, the painter, Richard Rychtarik, designer of scenery
for the Cleveland and Metropolitan Operas, and others. There
are profuse quotations from his letters and a quotation of sev-
eral stanzas from an interesting unpublished poem, "The Bridge
of Estador", which foreshadows several later poems.

The main purpose of the chapter as I wrote it was to pre-

sent the evolution of his style, as I said, and especially to
show how it developed toward the highly personal idiom of
his mature style manner. And this I believe I accomplished
fairly well.

The length of the chapter is about 6,000 words and stands
in final form except for a few very minor changes. Since I
am still hoping to have the book ready for Spring publication,
I suppose that you will wish to print the chapter in either
your Winter or Spring issue, if you are interested in it.
According to my contract with W. W. Norton & Co. I am allowed
to max sell a third of the book for publication elsewhere
previous to their printing of it, so I imagine there is no
difficulty on that score.

I would, of course, be delighted to have you use it if
it appeals to you; and will be glad to send it to you as
soon as I hear your reactions to the outline I have given of
it here.

PHILIP CLARK HORTON
10 WENDELL STREET
CAMBRIDGE, MASS.

January 4 '38

Dear Mr. Warren,

I have been missing my copies of the Southern
Review and intending for some time now to renew
my subscription which I carelessly let lappe some
time ago. Will you please enter me once again as
a subscriber, beginning with the winter issue
just out? I enclose my check for three dollars
in payment thereof.

I am now living at the above address, having
moved here to do research and reading at the widener
in connection with a new book I've just begun to
work on - a study of American poetry. I wonder,
if later on you would be at all interested in an
essay on certain 17th or 18th century American
poets - providing, of course, that I find the mat-
erial interesting enough to warrant such?

April 29 #38

Dear Mr. Warren,

This is to sound you out as to what possible
interest you might have in an essay on the Ger-
man poet, Raimer Maria Rilke. I am getting under
way on the piece now, and I'd like to have some
idea of what market, if any, there will be for it.

So far as I know Rilke has been almost com-
pletely neglected over here since the Pickman ar-
ticle in Hound & Horn in 1931. There seems to have
been more interest in him in England, but it has
been confined mostly, I believe, to the not-too-good
translations of his poetry by John Leishman and
the earlier and even worse translation of the Duin-
eser Elegien by the Sackville* Wests - a dreadful
bit off frou-frou. In view of the man's real and
very great stature as a writer, the condition ought
to be remedied. Not that I propose to do anything
exhaustive, but simply to start the ball rolling again.

I myself feel a great desire and need to go back
to him. I did a great deal of work with his poetry
for my undergraduate thesis and since then have
kept in touch with him only spasmodically through
M. D. Herter Norton (Mrs. W. W. ) who as the more
or less official (and certainly the best) transla-
tor of his work here receives a good many ms. on
his poetry from all over the country. Evidently
there is considerable interest, and it is a pity
it should remain private and underground.

I *know* plan to approach him primarily from
a study of his central conflict: i.e. sensibility
vs. reality - the conflict between a peculiarly
morbid and insular *sensibility* and the
will to create from it not a private fantasy but

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a vision of a more profound and more real living. By struggling throughout his life to reconcile the most extreme reaches of his own spirit (a morbid decadence and a vigorous moral idealism often reminiscent of Goethe) - and by achieving success in the struggle - he necessarily wrote poetry of universal importance. Or so it seems to me. There is something of the same struggle in Yeats' development - the polarity of the personal fantasy and the real - though he was free of Rilke's almost pathological morbidity. A nice instance of a writer who failed to resolve a like conflict in himself is Kafka, who accepted the fantasy alone as a false resolution, and whose work (consequently, I believe) moves in that dream-like condition, always inconclusive and always ambiguous, which has recently proved so fascinating to some of our younger writers. Because I feel there has been a good deal of misunderstanding of Kafka's meaning and importance, and because he furnishes such an apt and excellent foil to Rilke, I plan to elaborate this comparison at some length in the essay.

Perhaps this will give you a rough idea of what I plan to do. I would be very grateful to hear your reactions. Is it the kind of thing you would be interested in printing?

May 14 '38

Dear Mr. Warren,

I'm terribly disappointed to hear I
won't be able to do the Rilke for you. I'd
found a lot of new material (to me) here
at the Widener wherewith to round out a
really solid study of him - including by
the way a French translation of the Elegies!
Fresh from reading it, I can't resist quot-
ing for your delectation a sample: Rilke's
beautiful phrase "Uraltes Wehen vom Meer"
becomes "le souffle des origines venu de la
mer"! Almost as good as some of the Fr. tr/
of Shakespeare.

This reminds me to ask you, if in the
future some time (indefinitely) you would
be interested in a translation of the ten
Dunze's Elegien? The more I see of tran-
slation both English and French, the more
I am tempted to undertake them myself, though
it would probably be a long and difficult
job. I believe Spender and J. B. LeFeshman
and me have tentatively undertaken the job for
Norton, but it's quite possible that I may
it will drag on indefinitely.

Yes, I should be glad to do the Kafka
for you (though it's a great come-down from
Rilke!). I don't understand just what you
mean by a review. In general of his works,
or of some particular one? I take it to be
the former. In any case, if you will let me
know just what you had in mind I'll get to
work. Any particular rush about it?

Brookhaven, N. Y.

August 25, 1936

To the Editors of _The Southern Review_

Dear Sirs:

Since the publication of my article "The Greenberg Manuscript And Hart Crane's Poetry", which appeared in the Summer issue of your magazine, I have succeeded in discovering the identity of the unknown poet whose work influenced several of Crane's important poems. In order to answer some of the such information as I have finally gathered in order that some of the speculations and questions raised in my essay may be answered more conclusively than has hitherto been possible.

First, however, I would like to correct one definite mistake of fact that I made in the essay. As an indication that Crane knew of the Greenberg Ms. as early as 1920, I stated that he had mentioned his own poem, "Emblems of Conduct", in a letter to Gorham Munson in May of that year. Since receiving a complete transcription of the Munson correspondence, by kindness of the Library of Ohio State University, I have been able to check over all the letters in detail, and find that I was mistaken in this.

It was during the winter of 1923-24 that Crane first read the Greenberg Ms. He was living at that time with Slater Brown and Edward Nagle in Woodstock, New York, having escaped for a few months from the strenuous routine of writing advertising copy in New York City. During his visit there he passed many evenings in conversation with William Murrel Fisher, an art critic, who lived nearby. It was in the course of such an

#2

evening when the talk turned to literary curiosities that Mr. Fisher produced a large package of old cheap notebooks full of the strange poetic scribblings of Samuel B. Greenberg, a young Jewish invalid who had died 1916. As the two men read over the difficult penciled script, which had puzzled and excited Mr. Fisher for so long, Crane became more and more excited. He seized upon certain lines and phrases, and striding up and down the room, repeated them over and over, calling his companion to witness their power and originality and beauty. The reading continued through the evening until midnight, when Crane took his leave with the notebooks under his arm. His excitement in the discovery was immediately communicated to Gorham Munson, in a letter of December 20, 1923. "This poet, Greenberg," he wrote, "whom Fisher nursed until he died of consumption at a Jewish hospital in NY was a Rimbaud in embryo. Did you ever see some of the hobbling yet really gorgeous attempts that boy made without any education or time except when he became confined to a cot? Fisher has shown me an amazing amount of material, some of which I am copying and will show you when I get back. No grammar, nor spelling, and scarcely any form, but a quality that is unspeakably eerie and the most convincing gusto. One little poem as good as any of the consciously conceived "Pierrots" of Laforgue."

Crane kept the notebooks for several months, evidently reading and rereading the poems and copying those he considered best. These copies, typewritten on yellow foolscap, made up the sheaf of poems which were sent to me from the Isle of Pines and led to the discovery of this curious influence. You will recall that in my essay I mentioned that the makeup of this
MS

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MS was identical with the MS copies of "Voyages II", in which the Greenberg influence was apparent. The reason for this becomes clear now that it is known that Crane was copying the Greenberg MS during the same period - or shortly before it - in which he was working on his Voyage poem.

There is nothing of importance to add to what I wrote in the essay concerning the influence on Crane of these poems. The only question which may occur to you or your readers is that of why Crane never acknowledged the debt he owed in his "Emblems of Conduct" to the Greenberg MS. It would, of course, be absurd to suppose that he wished to conceal or repudiate this obligation in any way. He discussed the MS enthusiastically not only with Mr. Fisher, but also with Gorham Munson and Slater Brown. That he did not explicitly point out his direct borrowing in "Emblems of Conduct" can be construed only as an indication that he did not consider it of sufficient importance. Indeed, the influence of the Greenberg poetry upon his own work as a whole is actually very slight, however curious and suggestive it may be.

The information I have gathered concerning Greenberg as a person, however, may be of interest to you, especially since it clarifies to some extent the fantastic anomalies of his poetry. He was the younger son of a large and very poor Jewish family of New York City. The disease KIDAX with which he suffered was an hereditary one and orphaned him, I believe, at an early age, leaving KIDAX as the charge of his older brothers. With their meagre funds they were unable to support him entirely and in consequence much of his short life was spent in institutions for the destitute tubercular, principally at Wards Island and the Montefiore House. It was in these places that he scribbled most of his poetry, more often than not under the influence

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of the fever that was slowly consuming him. It was here, too,
that Mr. Fisher, who had met him through mutual
his
friends of the Greenberg family, come to visit him bringing
Greenberg
with him the books and conversation to which he owed what little
knowledge of poetry he had. His formal education was limited
to what little instruction he received in the New York public
schools during those periods when his health permitted his
attendance. Mr. Fisher, from whom I learned these facts, was
unable to tell me the exact year of his death; but it was pro
bably in 1916, when he was about twenty-two or twenty-three years old, that the slow disease finally overcame him in one
of the bleak rooms of the institution on Wards Island in the
East River.

Of the large mass of poetry he had written during
those few years only five notebooks were preserved, which
after his death were delivered by his brother to Mr. Fisher,
who seems to have been the only person at that time to have
appreciated his genius. Surely it must be called genius when
a boy ignorant of literature and isolated from the world by
promised disease which has early death, still persisted
in creating from his spirit a poetry at once powerfully original and beautiful in certain passages. It seems a strange coincidence of fate that a few lines of the poetry, ridiculed in
his own lifetime by fellow inmates as the rantings of
"Greenberg the Nut", should to-day find a permanent place in
American literature under the name of Hart Crane. It is to be
hoped that some day the notebooks will find another admirer
who will be able to carry still further the work commenced by
Crane, and edit the poems for publication under the author's
own name. They would constitute, I am sure, a worthy contribution,
to