Samuel Greenberg
Samuel Bernard Greenberg (December 13, 1893 – August 16, 1917) was an Austrian-American Jewish poet and artist. He grew up in poverty on New York City's Lower East Side and spent his last years in and out of charity hospitals. He died of tuberculosis at Manhattan State Hospital on Wards Island at age 23.
His family came from Vienna; he was the sixth of eight children, and his father embroidered gold and silver brocades to support them. Greenberg attended public school on the Lower East Side.
The best-known collection of his poems is Poems by Samuel Greenberg (1947), edited by Harold Holden and Jack McManis. An earlier, fuller set appeared in Poems from the Greenberg Manuscripts (1939).
Greenberg’s work drew attention when the poet Hart Crane published 11 of his poems in a Woodstock journal and used phrases from one Greenberg poem in his own Emblems of Conduct. Some critics say Crane plagiarized Greenberg, while others defend Crane’s approach.
Several of Greenberg’s poems have been set to music by Jewish-American composer Justin Henry Rubin, and one became a 2007 short multimedia film based on Greenberg’s The Pale Memory.
Other editions and studies include: Poems from the Greenberg Manuscripts: A Selection from the Work of Samuel B. Greenberg (1939); Poems by Samuel Greenberg: A Selection from the Manuscripts (1947); Poems from the Greenberg manuscript (reissued in 2019); Samuel Greenberg, Hart Crane, and the Lost Manuscripts by Marc Simon (1978); and Self Charm: Selected Sonnets & Other Poems (2005).
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 05:45 (CET).