The Black Riders and Other Lines

Composition and publication history

In the winter of 1893, Crane borrowed a suit from John Northern Hilliard and visited the critic and editor William Dean Howells, who introduced Crane to the poetry of Emily Dickinson. Crane was inspired by her writing and, within several months, wrote the beginnings of what became his first book of poetry. One friend recalled that he saw Crane's first attempts at poetry in mid-February 1894 and Hamlin Garland claimed in a later reminiscence that Crane brought him a pile of manuscripts the next month. Crane told friends that the poems came to him spontaneously and as pictures, saying, "They came, and I wrote them, that's all."

The Black Riders and Other Lines was published in May 1895 by Copeland & Day and marked Crane's first serious venture into poetry. It was Crane's second published volume, following Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) and predating The Red Badge of Courage (1895). Its first printing was a limited run of 500 copies, with a few issued in vellum. The collection contained sixty-eight short poems written in Crane's sparse, unconventional style. The untitled "lines", as Crane referred to them, were differentiated by Roman numerals and written entirely in small capitals. Crane was 23 years old when the book was published..

Response

Many of the poems in The Black Riders and Other Lines depict a vengeful God inspired by the Old Testament interacting with disrespectful humans. Critics were especially focused on the book's apparent anti-religious themes. Harriet Monroe wrote that the book "is full of wisdom of yesteryear... as old-fashioned as Bob Ingersoll's fiery denunciations. Crane's startling utterances... somehow cease to startle after twenty years." Amy Lowell, however, found these themes reflective of Crane's own struggle with belief: "He disbelieved it and he hated it, but he could not free himself from it... Crane's soul was heaped with bitterness and this bitterness he flung back at the theory of life which had betrayed him". Elbert Hubbard, who had encouraged Crane's unusual poetry, was impressed by their unconventional structure: "The 'Lines' in The Black Riders seem to me wonderful: charged with meaning like a storage battery. But there is a fine defy in the flavour that warns the reader not to take too much or it may strike in. Who wants a meal of horseradish?"

Crane himself thought The Black Riders a superior work to his more famous novel The Red Badge of Courage. As he wrote, "the former is the more ambitious effort. In it, I am to give my ideas of life as a whole, so far as I know it, and the latter is a mere episode,—an amplification".