Alfred Kreymborg—poet.

Born in New York City, 1883, of Danish ancestry. Educated at the Morris High School. A chess prodigy at the age of ten, and supported himself from seventeen to twenty-five by teaching chess and playing matches. Had several years of experience as bookkeeper.

In 1914, founded and edited The Glebe, which issued the first anthology of free verse. In 1916, 1917, 1919, published Others—three anthologies of radical poets. In 1921, went to Rome to edit, in association with Harold Loeb, an international magazine of the arts called The Broom (cf. Dial 70 [’21]: 606), but shortly after resigned.

Suggestions for Reading

1. Mr. Kreymborg is a rebel against all conventions of form and content in poetry. Consequently, the one thing to be expected in his work is the unexpected. How far his utterances are sincere and how far posed, each reader must judge for himself.

2. The following quotation from Poetry (9 [’16]: 51) may serve as a starting-point in discussing Mr. Kreymborg’s qualities: “An insinuating, meddlesome, quizzical, inquiring spirit; sometimes a clown, oftener a wit, now and then a lyric poet ... trips about cheerfully among life’s little incongruities; laughs at you and me and progress and prejudice and dreams; says ‘I told you so!’ with an air, as if after a double somersault in the circus ring; grows wistful, even tender, with emotions always genuine ... always ... as becomes the harlequin-philosopher, entertaining.”

3. The new movements in art—Futurist, Cubist, Vorticist—should be remembered in studying Mr. Kreymborg’s verse.

4. What is to be said of his economy in words?

Bibliography