Miscellaneous
One of the most striking poems in the American poet Hart Crane’s first collection, ‘White Buildings’ (1926) is ‘Emblems of Conduct’. Long after Crane’s premature death in 1932, it emerged that this poem was in fact a mosaic of lines appropriated from an almost unknown New York poet called Samuel Greenberg, who had died in 1917 at the age of 23 – and whose work would probably have disappeared altogether had it not been plagiarized by Crane. This lecture will explore the nature and implications of this theft, and make a case for the long neglected work of the ill-fated Greenberg.