Sadakichi Hartmann

Carl Sadakichi Hartmann (November 8, 1867 – November 22, 1944) was an American art critic, poet, and anarchist.

Biography

Hartmann, born on the artificial island of Dejima, Nagasaki, to a Japanese mother Osada Hartmann (who died soon after childbirth) and German businessman Carl Herman Oskar Hartmann and raised in Germany, arrived in Philadelphia in 1882 and became an American citizen in 1894. An important early participant in modernism, Hartmann was a friend of such diverse figures as Walt Whitman, Stéphane Mallarmé and Ezra Pound. From his experience of having known Walt Whitman, considered one of the great poets of the 19th century, he wrote Conversations with Walt Whitman (1895). He also wrote a collection of poetry in homage to Mallarmé, Naked Ghosts (1898).

Around 1905, Hartmann was an occasional performer at the New York City Miner's Theater. His act involved a device which dispensed perfumes in a manner intended to be analogous to notes in a symphony, which was poorly received by the crowd.

His poetry, deeply influenced by the Symbolists as well as orientalist literature, includes:

1904's Drifting Flowers of the Sea and Other Poems

1913's My Rubaiyat

1915's Japanese Rhythms

His works of criticism include Shakespeare in Art (1901) and Japanese Art (1904). During the 1910s, Hartmann let himself be crowned King of the Bohemians by Guido Bruno in New York's Greenwich Village. Hartmann wrote some of the earliest English language haiku.

He was one of the first critics to write about photography, with regular essays in Alfred Stieglitz's Camera Notes. Hartmann published criticism and conducted lecture tours under the pseudonym "Sidney Allen."