Samuel Greenberg

Samuel Bernard Greenberg (December 13, 1893 – August 16, 1917) was an Austrian-American Jewish poet and artist. Greenberg grew up in poverty on the Lower East Side of New York City and spent the last years of his life in and out of charity hospitals. He died of tuberculosis in the Manhattan State Hospital on Wards Island. Marc Simon writes, "Jacob and Hannah Greenberg, before coming to the new world, had lived with their family in Vienna. They had eight children; the sixth named Samuel was born in Vienna in 1893. His father supported the large family by embroidering gold and silver brocades for religious and other purposes . . . Greenberg attended public school 160 on Suffix Street at the corner of Rivington, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan."

The fullest collection of his poems is Poems by Samuel Greenberg, ed. Harold Holden and Jack McManis, New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1947.

The critical attention Greenberg has received began when the critic William Murrell Fisher (1889–1969) first showed Hart Crane 11 Greenberg poems he had published in a journal called The Ploughshare in Woodstock, NY, as well as several notebooks full of poems Greenberg's brother Morris had left him. Crane retyped 41 poems on 32 pages on yellow foolscap and brought the manuscript back to New York with him on the train on January 2, 1924. Crane created a poem of his own called "Emblems of Conduct" from phrases of a poem by Greenberg called "Conduct," interspersed with lines of his own. The poem was published in Crane's first collection, White Buildings, to attract attention to Greenberg. Crane was dubious about including it, but Malcolm Cowley and Allen Tate urged him to use the poem.

Other critics, however, have charged Crane with being disingenuous and having actually plagiarized Greenberg's work.

A number of his poems have been set to music by the Jewish-American composer Justin Henry Rubin, one of which became a short multimedia film (2007) based on Greenberg's The Pale Memory (completed in collaboration with artist John Merigliano).