  Edwin Curran was born at Zanesville, Ohio, May 10, 1892, and was educated at St. Thomas’ School in the city of his birth. After working as an unskilled laborer in various trades, he learned telegraphy in 1914 and has been employed ever since as an operator for the Pennsylvania Railroad Company. In 1917 he printed a little paper-bound pamphlet of thirty pages (First Poems) with this naÏve note: “Price of this book is 35 cents postpaid. Author is 25, unmarried, a beginner and needs publisher. If this volume meets expenses, another, possibly better, will be issued.” Expecting to find poetry of an absurd simplicity, one is startled to find striking images, strange pictures and (in such poems as “Soldier’s Epitaph” and “Sailing of Columbus”) lines like: We climbed the slippery alleys of the sea and many a lyric flash like: The stars, like bells, flash down the silver sky ... Ringing like chimes on frozen trees, or cry Along the marble ground. Second Poems (1920) has a similar beauty mixed with banality. Both booklets are a jumble of passion, platitude, bad |
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