Stephen Crane - 110 years ahead of his time

The initial inspiration for this year's poetic form comes from an unlikely place: the 19th century. Over a hundred years before the launch of twitter, Stephen Crane was writing compact, unpretentious verse - a handful of which were 140 characters or less.

A man blessed with a knack for description and an above average mustache, Crane led a short, storied life: he was war correspondent in the Spanish-American War, survived a shipwreck, shacked up with a madam, befriended Joseph Conrad and H.G. Wells, and wrote one of the most lauded war novels in the English language. Red Badge of Courage is certainly what Stephen Crane is best known for, but he was also an accomplished journalist, short story writer, and of course, poet. Above all else though, Crane was a humanist. Even his most detestable characters are written through a compassionate lens, and with stories like "Maggie: Girl of the Streets" and "An Experiment in Misery," Crane pushed his affluent, 19th centruy readers to open their eyes to the complex realities of slum life. Stephen Crane died of tuberculosis in 1900, at the age of 28 - my age as I write this.

Below are a couple of my favorite of his tweet-length poems:

You tell me this is God?

I tell you this is a printed list,

A burning candle and an ass.

-

A man said to the universe:

“Sir, I exist!”

“However,” replied the universe,

“The fact has not created in me

A sense of obligation.”

-

If I should cast off this tattered coat,

And go free into the mighty sky;

If I should find nothing there

But a vast blue,

Echoless, ignorant, –

What then?

-

Check out more of his stuff at: http://www.poemhunter.com/stephen-crane-2/poems/

Make sure you at least look at:

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/a-man-saw-a-ball-of-gold-in-the-sky/

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/there-was-a-man-with-tongue-of-wood-2/

http://www.infoplease.com/t/lit/war-is-kind/33.html

and

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-wayfarer-3/