In his 1921 flâneur’s guide to New York City, Hints to Pilgrims, the dramatist and essayist Charles S. Brooks briefly interrupts his rhapsodies over the city’s ‘restaurants and theatres … bridges … the shipping … parks … fifth avenue … electric signs’ with a sketch of its ‘quartier Latin’, Greenwich Village. Brooks’s interlude revolves around a brief meeting with a ‘not entirely famous’ young poet at his lodgings ‘just North of Greenwich Village’ in the spring of 1919. The poet, whose ‘verses’, Brooks writes, are ‘of the newer sort’, was the 19-year-old Hart Crane, then living above the offices of Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap’s Little Review (which Brooks chauvinistically dubs ‘The Shriek’), and whose career began in the pages of the Village’s lively journals.

Crane appears beslippered on the staircase of his dark, decaying, ‘tarnished’ and ‘frescoed’ building which, for Brooks, recalls Thomas De Quincey’s glamorously decrepit ‘vast gothic halls’. With its roots in an ‘earlier bohemia in the lower Manhattan of the 1890s’, the Village’s distinct brand of modernism in the late 1910s was steeped in references to past generations of artists and writers. As Stephen Rogers has noted, its aesthetic was given particular ‘impetus’ by the ‘spirit of Decadence’ fashionable in local literary circles, including the pages of Crane’s first magazine publishers, Bruno’s Weekly and The Pagan. At once a Wildean, loquacious dandy, and terse defender of the ‘newer’ poetry, Crane is presented as the Greenwich Village archetype made flesh in Brooks’s self-described ‘memorandum’ of the ‘characters’ of New York City. ‘Emergent and vestigial styles’, to borrow Langdon Hammer’s useful phrase, operate in Crane’s poetry as ‘opposing energies [that] contend and cooperate, working to undo traditional authority and to reconstruct it in new forms’. Crane’s early publications in the post-Decadent, bohemian journals of Greenwich Village illuminate what was most distinct about his poetics: both modern and antique, European and American, formally experimental and traditional. His engagement with periodicals and the processes of publishing and revision from those early days in Greenwich Village fundamentally shaped his poetic development.