Hart Crane and the Little Magazine

Abstract

This thesis examines Hart Crane’s oeuvre through a detailed appraisal of his publishing history in little magazines. The main contention of this thesis is that Crane’s relationships with his periodical publishers shaped his poetic development, and that new light is shed on these works through their recontextualisation in their original periodical contexts. This raises a secondary question: how does Crane’s publication in journals and his relationships with editors affect the reception of his poetry, and can patterns established in his immediate reception be found in later criticism. This study takes a new approach in its methodology, both in relation to existing studies of Crane, and as a way of dealing with a writer’s body of work. By examining, as D. F. McKenzie has put it, ‘the sociology of texts’ and their ‘processes of transmission, including production and reception’, forgotten contexts of Crane’s poetry are able to emerge. As well as uncovering new works by Crane, an examination of Crane’s periodical networks highlights the influence of particular strands of Modernism on his development, such as ‘post-Decadent’ forms advanced in Greenwich Village journals, the American Futurist experiments active in American magazines based in Europe, and the proto-Surrealist experiments with metaphor that inform Crane’s own associative aesthetic. This study also traces the interconnections between poetic form and publishing. Crane’s long poems, 'The Bridge', ‘For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen’ and the ‘Voyages’, were all published in fragments in a number of different journals, and these publishing formats are found to be aesthetically significant for these texts, and articulate Crane’s wider interest in fragment and collage forms.