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1Author:  Crane review: Barry, John D.Add
 Title:  A note on Stephen Crane  
 Published:  1996 
 Subjects:  University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text 
 Description: Not long ago, the New York Evening Post, in an editorial discussing "The Decay of Decadence," grouped the late Stephen Crane, as a poet, with the Symbolists of France and England. I was struck by the association, for the reason that I happened to be familiar with the peculiar circumstances under which The Black Riders and Other Lines, from which a quotation is made in the editorial, had come to be written. As a matter of fact, at the time of writing that volume it is probable that Mr. Crane had never even heard of the Symbolists; if he had heard of them, it is pretty certain that he had never read them. He was then about twenty-one years of age, and he was woefully ignorant of books. Indeed, he deliberately avoided reading from a fear of being influenced by other writers. He had already published Maggie, his first novel, and by sending it to Mr. Hamlin Garland he had made an enthusiastic friend. Through Mr. Garland he met several other writers, among them Mr. W. D. Howells. One evening while receiving a visit from Mr. Crane, Mr. Howells took from his shelves a volume of Emily Dickinson's verses and read some of these aloud. Mr. Crane was deeply impressed, and a short time afterward he showed me thirty poems in manuscript, written, as he explained, in three days. These furnished the bulk of the volume entitled The Black Riders. It was plain enough to me that they had been directly inspired by Miss Dickinson, who, so far as I am aware, has never been classed with the Symbolists. And yet, among all the critics who have discussed the book, no one, to my knowledge, at any rate, has called attention to the resemblance between the two American writers. It is curious that this boy, feeling his way toward expression as he was then doing, should have been stimulated by so simple and so sincere a writer as Miss Dickinson into unconscious cooperation with the decadent writers of Europe. Perhaps an explanation may be suggested by the association of Mr. Crane at this period with a group of young American painters, who had brought from France the impressionistic influences, which with him took literary form.
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