Happy Birthday to
Stephen Maria Crane
1st of November 1871
In a brief life he packed in a great deal of experience and he left behind some excellent written work. He was primarily a writer of novels who also wrote some fine poetry.
. Many red devils ran from my heart
. And out upon the page,
. They were so tiny
. The pen could mash them.
. And many struggled in the ink.
. It was strange
. To write in this red muck
. Of things from my heart.
His first book Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) was a well written account of the life of a young girl living in the slums and her gradual descent into prostitution. He researched this with frequent visits to the area around Bowery Street (a very poor district in NY) whilst living a bohemian existence in New York student accommodation. Crane actually paid for the publication himself with money from the sale of his mother’s house. It was written under the pen name of Johnston Smith.
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However it is his second book that is the one for which he is best remembered. That was The Red Badge of Courage (1895) about the experiences of a young soldier during the American Civil War and that soldier’s eventual courageous actions. This was also thoroughly researched with interviews with old soldiers. His descriptions of the psychological stress and strain could easily be descriptions of post traumatic stress disorder long before that term was ever dreamed of. On the strength of this vivid descriptive writing he became the New York Journal’s war correspondent in Turkey during the Greco-Turkish War. The book brought him international fame almost overnight and somewhat eclipsed The Black Riders and other lines (1895) which was his first book of poetry and was published at the same time. This is the title poem oldpoetry.com/opoem/16031
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What little poetry we have by Crane is very much in keeping with his writings in that it expresses the same themes and is written with the same sensibilities. His poems are usually brief and in what is known as free verse. They often depict man trying to come to terms, often unsuccessfully, with an uncaring world and extracts the grim comedic possibilities of the situation in a sardonically gleeful fashion.
Crane was, during his lifetime accused of drug abuse and Satanism by people who only knew him through his writing. Poems such as God Lay Dead in Heaven oldpoetry.com/opoem/5827 and I Saw a Man Pursuing the Horizon oldpoetry.com/opoem/5784
His black humour can be seen in his poem Behold the Grave of a Wicked Man oldpoetry.com/opoem/5785 This shows the conflict between hope (the maid) and despair (the stern spirit) that is in much of Crane’s work.
His second book of poetry was War is Kind and other lines (1899) from which this is the title poem oldpoetry.com/opoem/16031 Within a year he was dead of Tuberculosis and we can only guess about what treasures he would have gone on to write in his mature years.
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