Last week's selection was from William Shakespeare, the greatest poet in the English language. Arguably, the greatest poet ever, in any language. He was a towering, historic figure, a genius. This week, I decided to feature two poems by Nathalia Crane. She is neither a great poet nor a towering historic figure. Indeed, she is hardly remembered today. Her work is not, so far as I know, included in any modern anthology of poetry. In fact, I cannot even find out whether she is still alive. One of the few references to her and to her work on the Internet says that she "became a professor at San Diego State College, & championed sundry leftist causes." One can presume, however, that at the age of 90, she is probably no longer there.

But hers is a remarkable story, nevertheless, for she was a child poet, a protégé, a sensation in her day. She began writing poetry when she was just over eight years old. She was nine when she sent a few of her poems to the New York Sun and, according to Louis Untermeyer, they were accepted wholly on their merit, the Sun not knowing that they came from a child.

Her first volume of poetry was published in 1924, when she was ten and a half years old. It was entitled The Janitor's Boy, and caused a bit of a stir, or in the words of Untermeyer, it "became one of the most discussed publications of the year." He notes that "some of the critics explained the work by insisting that the child was some sort of medium, an instrument unaware of what was played upon it; others, considering the book a hoax, scorned the fact that any child could have written verses so smooth in execution and so remarkable in spiritual overtones."

Crane published three more volumes of poetry in the next four years. In 1926, at the age of 13, she wrote a book, which Untermeyer says, "showed her curiously pompous style in a long alliterative account of the Children's Crusade." It was entitled The Sunken Garden. And in 1929 she wrote a novel entitled An Alien from Heaven. While attending the New Jersey College for Women and Barnard she was prevented from publishing. After graduating, she published three more volumes of poetry, in 1936, 1939 and 1942.

I can find nothing about her life in the subsequent six decades, except that she obviously quit writing poetry for publication. This much I know about her. She was descended, through her father's family, from John and Priscilla Alden, and through mother's side from the Abarbanels, a famous family of Spanish Jews. The author and poet Stephen Crane was a relative.

She does not merit an entry in the recent editions Cambridge Guide to Literature in English, the Oxford Companion to English Literature, The Merriam Webster's Encyclopedia of Literature, or Benet's Reader's Encyclopedia. She is included in a recent edition of Benet's Reader's Encyclopedia of American Literature. The write up contains the following: "There was much naiveté, but also an astonishing command of poetic technique, the obvious influence of Emily Dickinson, and some philosophizing."

A recent edition of the Larousse Dictionary of Writers goes a bit further, although it is not clear whether the book is picking on Emily Dickinson or praising Crane. It contains this observation: "Later works evoked the same surreal blend of simplicity and precocious understanding; certainly there were no more elements of doggerel [in Crane's poetry] than in the jogtrot, hymn-book rhythms of Emily Dickinson, who, by the time Crane was publishing, was enshrined as a major American poet." Untermeyer says this: Her poems "reach beyond cavil or controversy. The appeal of such lines is not that they have been written by a child but by a poet." Enjoy.