|
Introduction
Opening Salvo Stephen Crane is best known as the author
of The Red Badge of Courage. It is a Song for Stephen Crane
The Reality of It All Stephen Crane was born six years after the American Civil war ended in 1871 in New Jersey. As a young boy he was as sickly and frail as he was precocious. Stephen was not regularly enrolled in school until January 1880, but had no difficulty in completing two grades in six weeks. His father, a minister, died when he was a young. Stephen was raised by his older siblings in various sections of northern New Jersey. After attending a number of colleges, including Claverack College, Lafayette College, and Syracuse University, he left formal schooling behind and traveled to New York to work as a reporter. Mr. Crane's beat covered New York's slum life. As a full-time writer, he made trips into New York City and wandering into tenements and exploring the Bowery's saloons, dance halls, brothels and flophouses. Mr. Crane would later tell a friend, R. G. Vosburgh, that human nature here "was open and plain, with nothing hidden" and that is why he was drawn there.
From the beginning of his writing career, Mr. Crane stated that his, "... desire was to write plainly and unmistakably, so that all men might read and understand. That to my mind is good writing." Mr. Crane described what it felt like to be in a war by writing his "psychological portrayal of fear", The Red Badge of Courage. He told the story from the point of view of a young private who is at first filled with boyish dreams of the glory of war and then quickly becomes disillusioned by war's harsh reality. Mr. Crane would later tell Hamlin Garland that the first words and paragraphs came to him with "every word in place, every comma, every period fixed."
Even though Hamlin Garland and William Dean Howells encouraged him to send his poetry out for publication, Mr. Crane's use of confessional free verse was too unconventional for most. He was never recognized during his lifetime as a poet. His experiences as a war correspondent in Greece and Cuba for both William Randolph Hearst's and Joseph Pulitzer's newspapers made him both popular as a writer during his lifetime and the mold for realist journalism to follow. He was the model for the likes of Earnest Hemmingway and others. After fighting with his first publisher and pulling his book of poems, The Black Riders and Other Lines, it was picked up by Copeland & Day. He received a 10 percent royalty and the publisher assured him that the book would be in a form "more severely classic than any book ever yet issued in America." The first printing of five hundred copies was followed by criticism for the poetry's use of free verse; a piece in the Bookman called Mr. Crane "the Aubrey Beardsley of poetry" and another commentator stated that "there is not a line of poetry from the opening to the closing page. Whitman's Leaves of Grass were luminous in comparison. Poetic lunacy would be a better name for the book." Mr. Crane was not dismayed; he was pleased that the book was "making some stir".
The ending to Mr. Crane's too short life is well documented and known. He ran off with the married owner of a brothel and they lived in England as common law husband and wife. Of course this was scandalous and created its own cult of personality in the last days of the Victorian Age. During the last year of his life he took refuge in the south of England, where he lived with his common-law wife, Cora Taylor, the former madam of a Jacksonville brothel. Plagued by exhaustion and ill health, Stephen Crane died of tuberculosis in a sanatorium in the Black Forest at the age of twenty-eight in 1900.
What Stephen Crane Means To American Literature Mr. Crane's poetry, which he refereed to as lines rather than poems, was strikingly new in its minimalist meter. It employs symbolic imagery in order to communicate irony and paradox. Mr. Crane was well known in academic circles and to the literary. His influence on 20th century realism is immense. He used his poetry to define a new set of rules and images. This was not the high flying rhyme scheme of romantic poetry. His poetry has the gritty feel of life that was not even described by Walt Whitman.
Today Mr. Crane is considered one of the most innovative writers to emerge in the United States during the 1890s and one of the founders of Realism. H. G. Wells wrote about Mr. Crane's style: "the first expression of the opening mind of a new period, or, at least, the early emphatic phase of a new initiative-beginning, as a growing mind needs begin, with the record of impressions, a record of a vigor and intensity beyond all precedent."
Bibliography:
As I state over and again this is not an academic paper. This is just my introduction to you. I hope that I have opened a window and that you will look out and feel the breeze of greatness. Thanks.
For more from Harry visit his columns: March, February, January, December, November, October; and his poetry: March, February, January, December, November, and October. Or his online home. |
Cheshire Cat
Nothin' Better
Anyone
who has talked to me longer than ten minutes knows that Walt
Whitman is my favorite poet. My first date with my wife was to
Walt Whitman's house and grave in Camden, NJ. My last date with
my wife before I became an "ex" husband was to Walt
Whitman's birth place on Long Island, NY. And we had a number
of Walt excursions in-between. Then comes the Beats, i.e. 
book filled with realism and an amazing depiction of the horrors
and trials of war. The best known war stories until Crane's book
were mostly filled with heroics and triumphs. Mr. Crane showed
another side. He is often considered the father of American realism
providing a more journalistic view of life. There are a great
many papers written about Mr. Crane's influence on 20th century
writers; see Earnest Hemmingway and Norman Mailer, to name two.
His short stories are still some of the best depictions of ordinary
people facing extraordinary circumstances. Mr. Crane, not known
as a poet, brings this same sensitivity to his verse. 
