Stephen Crane, Poet

THE COLLECTED POEMS OF STEPHEN CRANE -- Knopf ($2.50).

Few people nowadays read the late great Author Stephen Crane, though 30 years ago he was a pride of the U. S. His Red Badge of Courage is still considered one of the best war books ever written. A first-class though uneven prose writer, as a versifier he was uniformly second-rate. This book reprints all his poems, including four discovered among his papers in Jacksonville in 1928 and printed in The Bookman last April.

Newspaperman, war correspondent, Author Crane's metrical thoughts on newspapers are interesting:

A newspaper is a collection of half-injustices

Which, bawled by boys from mile to mile,

Spreads its curious opinion

To a million merciful and sneering men,

While families cuddle the joys of the fireside

When spurred by a tale of dire lone agony.

A newspaper is a court

Where everyone is kindly and unfairly tried

By a squalor of honest men.

A newspaper is a market

Where wisdom sells its freedom

And melons are crowned by the crowd.

A newspaper is a game

Where his error scores the player victory

While another's skill wins death.

A newspaper is a symbol;

It is feckless life's chronicle,

A collection of loud tales

Concentrating eternal stupidities,

That in remote ages lived unhaltered,

Roaming through a fenceless world.

Only one of Author Crane's poems has the quality of memorability:

A man said to the universe:

"Sir, I exist!"

"However," replied the universe,

"The fact has not created in me

A sense of obligation."

Stephen Crane, 14th child of a Methodist pastor, was born in Newark. N. J.. in 1871, became a newspaperman at an early age. His first novel, Maggie, a Girl of the Streets, was printed at his own expense, under a pseudonym; it fell flat. His second, The Red Badge of Courage, brought him jobs as war correspondent although until then he had never seen a battle. He served in a Cuban filibustering expedition, the Greco-Turkish War; Spanish-American War. The last few years of his life he lived in England, was a great & good friend of the late great Joseph Korzeniowski (Conrad). No less a pundit than Herbert George Wells has said that Crane's The Open Boat is "the finest short story in the English language." Tall, lean, with very straight hair, hollow eyes, drooping mustache. Author Crane moved, smiled, spoke slowly. He died of consumption at Baden, Germany, in 1900. Other books: George's Mother, The Little Regiment, The Monster.

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