Alfred Francis Kreymborg was an American poet, novelist, playwright, literary editor and anthologist. He earned his place in the history of twentieth-century literature partly because he recognized the genius of other writers.
Background
Alfred Francis Kreymborg was born on December 10, 1883. He was the youngest of five children in a Roman Catholic family on the East Side of New York City. His father, Hermann Charles Kreymborg, was a German-born cigar packer and shop owner; His mother was born in New York to German parents.
Education
Despite inauspiciously repeating his second year in a public high school and then dropping out altogether, Alfred was a prodigy who showed promise. By the age of ten he had taught himself chess and the mandolin. After leaving school and wandering in and out of some clerical jobs, he taught himself to play the piano and became passionately interested in music.
Career
Accepting that he did not have what it took to write a symphony, Alfred decided to write poetry informed by music. This decision was followed by years of unpublished struggle, during which he supported himself by playing chess professionally. Undaunted, his love of music became a distinguishing element in his work.
Kreymborg's first significant work was Edna: The Girl of the Street, a story based on an actual meeting with a prostitute. It was published in 1915, ten years after it was written, in a special number of the Bruno Chap Books. Because of the book's content, obscenity charges were brought against the publisher, Guido Bruno, who was subsequently acquitted.
In 1908 Kreymborg published a small volume of prose poetry titled Love and Life, and Other Studies. He also made his first attempt at starting a literary journal, the American Quarterly. The project never quite got off the ground, however, which frustrated Kreymborg tremendously. A determined Kreymborg took the next editing opportunity by managing the Musical Advance, which also failed, this time because he had tried to turn a musical magazine into a literary magazine.
Meanwhile, Kreymborg had found his way into the bohemian circles of Greenwich Village, where he met the artist Man Ray. Kreymborg and Ray started a new literary and art review journal called the Glebe, in September, 1913, with funding by bookstore owners Albert and Charles Boni. The magazine featured work by such famous authors as H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), William Carlos Williams, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Richard Aldington, and Amy Lowell, but lasted only a year. Kreymborg, who favored emerging American poets (especially imagists), clashed with the Boni brothers, who preferred more established European writers.
Kreymborg was still working on his own writing during this time, and in 1914 published a novelette about a waitress entitled Ernci Vitek. He could not find a publisher for his novel about a department store clerk, "Rose Schelling." Frustrated with fiction writing, he abandoned it. However, he was still fascinated with the lives of the working class, and with Walt Whitman and Robert Browning as his literary guides, he focused his poetry on this subject.
Kreymborg taught himself the poetic form vers libre (free verse) by assigning musical values to words, and arranging the verses like a musical piece. He was influenced by the imagists (poets who sought to capture the essence of an image in its most concentrated form), particularly Ezra Pound. He and Pound wrote each other for several years, and eventually they met in Paris. In 1916 Kreymborg published a book of his poems called Mushrooms: A Book of Free Forms. That same year, Kreymborg joined the Provincetown Players. Provincetown member John Reed gave Kreymborg the opportunity to produce and direct his verse play, Lima Beans. Inspired by its success, Kreymborg continued writing verse plays, many of which he performed with his traveling puppet theater.
After leaving Glebe, Kreymborg founded Others, A Magazine of the New Verse, which featured more unruly, formless poetry than the imagist poetry of Glebe. Kreymborg included his own poetry, as well as poetry by Mina Loy, William Carlos Williams, Orrick Johns, T. S. Elliot, Amy Lowell (despite her disapproval of the journal's direction), and Carl Sandburg. Kreymborg often hosted literary salons in his own home, and networked with other literary magazine participants, particularly with those of Chicago's prestigious Poetry. Kreymborg had work published in this and other influential little magazines. In 1920 he published Blood of Things, based on the perspectives of (mainly) natural creatures: "Worms," "Ducklings," "Robins," "Hen Being,'' "Electric Sign," and, oddly enough, "Cigar Butt.'' This continued his experimentation with vers libre and imagism.
In the spring of 1921, Kreymborg left Others to edit Broom, a magazine based in Rome and founded by a wealthy Princeton graduate named Harold Loeb. Kreymborg and Dorothy visited Paris, where he was introduced to several other literary luminaries such as James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Jean Cocteau. Marcel Duchamp, whom Kreymborg knew from New York, introduced him to the Dadaists.
Kreymborg edited four volumes of Broom, with poems by Walter de la Mare, Amy Lowell, Louis Untermeyer, Lola Ridge, Wallace Stevens, Conrad Aiken, and Marianne Moore. In addition to work by the Dadaist and other experimental poetry. Broom also featured artwork by Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Jacques Lipchitz, and Man Ray. But Kreymborg soon encountered the same problem he had had with Glebe: Loeb preferred established European writers while Kreymborg favored experimental American writers. Kreymborg also felt he could not give his own poetry a proper amount of attention because of his editorial demands, so he left Broom in the fall of 1922.
It was during his travels through Italy after leaving Broom that Kreymborg veered toward formalism. He wrote forty sonnets and published these as Less Lonely in 1923. When he returned to New York he wrote his autobiography, Troubadour (published in 1925), so named because Kreymborg felt his calling was to be a troubadour, a traveling bard. He also published a book of poetry, Scarlet and Mellow (1926). A critic writing for the New Republic praised this poetry collection, saying that "Mr. Kreymborg's musical training has been apparent in all his writing, and its evidence is not diminished in Scarlet and Mellow. Many of these new poems suggest instrumental improvisations, tenderly conceived, deftly executed." Kreymborg and his wife continued to travel, giving lectures, readings, and puppet shows throughout the country during this period.
Scarlet and Mellow deepened the poet's commitment to formalism and imagism, his obsession with sonnets and the working world. This volume heralded a fruitful period in Kreymborg's life, and he went on to edit five "American Caravan" anthologies, a book of verse plays called There's a Moon Tonight (1926), and a children's book, Funnybone Alley (1927). His lengthiest achievement was a 630-page history of American poetry. Our Singing Strength: An Outline of American Poetry (1620-1930). Of the 450 poets covered in the text, 280 are his contemporaries. This ruffled some critics, who also thought Our Singing Strength lacked any critical boundaries. Malcolm Cowley, a critic for the New York Herald Tribune, remarked that most of the poets "might very well have been disregarded." Margaret Wallace of the New York Evening Post criticized Kreymborg's seeming lack of standards and evenly distributed enthusiasm which "enlivens a part of it, [but] renders the whole vaguely unreliable." Still, many readers appreciated the attention paid to newer poets. John Chamberlain, writing for the New York Times, December 15, 1929, suggested that while its critical approach was not its strength, it did serve as "more a work of literary ex-cavation than a summing up... the sort of exploration that must be done before the critic per se can hope to move with any assurance among American poets."
During this time Kreymborg also published two poetry books, The Lost Sail (1928) and Manhattan Men (1929). By now the Kreymborgs were summering in Cape Cod, which is why The Lost Sail focuses on life on the Cape. His poetry is more formal, but also quieter and more meditative, in this tome. Critics have repeatedly described it as mellow, a tone that contrasts with the high-pitched energy in his next book of poetry, Manhattan Men. The formalism in Manhattan Men loosens a little, and Kreymborg experiments with speech rhythms in his examination of New York City's bustling commerce and working denizens. After the stock market crash of 1928, Kreymborg began a series of poems called "The Economic Muse," as a reaction to the traumas caused by the crash. He felt responsible as a poet to vocalize people's struggles. He also used his poetry to protest the growing fascism in Europe.
In anticipation of the World War II, Kreymborg wrote and performed The Planets (1938), an allegorical radio play. In The Planets, an astrologer struggles futilely to defeat the gods Mars, Jupiter, and Uranus and their designs for the two world wars and the market crash. During the war, Kreymborg, ever a pacifist, wrote a series of poems called "Arms and Armageddon" (1939-1944) included in his Selected Poetns. These were mostly patriotic ballads and denunciations of World War II. At this time he also served as president of the Poetry Society of America, a Pulitzer Prize judge in poetry, and as a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters.
Kreymborg's last major work is Man and Shadow: An Allegory (1946), an 240-page-long poem in blank verse (with a few rhymed couplets). In the poem, the poet wanders for a day through Central Park, meeting various characters with whom he converses in lyrics, chants, monologues, and dialogues. Considered to some as an addition to his autobiography, Man and Shadow ends by reminding the readers that everyone must do their part to support democracy and the Republic through the war and in times of peace. No More War and Other Poems (1950) was Kreymborg's last volume of poetry. It continues the same themes, condemning fascism and glorifying ordinary working people. Kreymborg continued to publish in journals through late 1950s. Late in life he suffered from Parkinson's disease and was not able to continue his writing. He died on August 14, 1966.
Through a myriad of tastes and political influences Alfred became a humanist, a formalist, an imagist, a pacifist, and an enthusiast for the common people.
Connections
Alfred married Gertrude Lord, but they divorced in 1916. While writing speeches and letters in 1918 for a Wall Street businessman, he married his employer's secretary, Dorothy Bloom. This marriage lasted throughout their lives.