‘I don’t think you were supposed to become as steeped in your material as I did with Hart Crane’, writes Eileen Myles in ‘hart!’. They continue: ‘I attached my homosexual poet to him and took a ride. Planes overhead, a train hurtling along its tracks. They had so much time back then and they were meanwhile very interested in speed. They thought the future would be amazing and it is, don’t you think.’ As in Myles’s ‘hart!’, Crane is a frequently conjured presence in contemporary poetry, and the recipient of an unusual number of elegies. Periodicals can offer a latitudinal view of literary history, sweeping away retrospectively imposed hierarchies and allowing for a reading of Crane unencumbered by dominant interpretations of his work. The complex matrices of influence and exchange explored in this book trouble attempts to assert the dominance of one particular poet or clique within a literary culture, while showing the complex, emerging processes of canon formation that laid the groundwork for the rise of New Critical approaches to literary studies. As detailed studies have shown, Crane’s poetry is attentive to the language and formal movements of his antecedents. But his poems urgently work through the ideas and aesthetic questions that animated contemporary periodical culture. However much Crane might have disliked ‘assumptions’ of his ‘literary ambitions in relation to one group, faction, “opportunity,” or another’, his poetry suggests a shifting coterie poetics as he moved between communities. As I have explored, this emerged variously: from his adoption of Wildean masks in his early poems in The Pagan and Bruno’s Weekly to his engagement with arguments between Broom and Secession in ‘For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen’ to his poems to William Sommer and Gaston Lachaise in 1924.

Poems to and after Crane, intriguingly, offer a parallel literary history of his work. Poems such as ‘hart!’ form a body of creative criticism, simultaneously offering independent interpretations of his poetry and teasing at the critical shibboleths that surround his work.