In early December 1924 Hart Crane sent a curt letter to the writer and editor Gorham Munson requesting that Munson ‘take whatever decisions or formalities are necessary to “excommunicate” me from your literary circle’. The letter, which followed a fractious lunch meeting between the two friends, referred to a long-standing argument between Munson’s own journal, Secession, and its stalking horse, Broom. But Crane’s deep irritation with Munson (their relationship never fully recovered from Crane’s missive) reveals his broader principles as a poet. ‘I am not prepared to welcome threats’, Crane wrote, ‘from any quarters that I know of – which are based on assumptions of my literary ambitions in relation to one group, faction “opportunity,” or another.’ Secession and Broom were both ‘exile’ journals – two magazines edited by Americans in Europe, following the relative strength of the post-war dollar. Their argument roughly mapped on to the Paris–Dada split between André Breton (Secession) and Tristan Tzara (Broom) and the emergence of Surrealism.

Munson had wished to claim Crane as a ‘Secessionist’. This would secure Crane’s affiliation with the magazine in Munson’s ongoing conflict with the Broom editors and Crane’s friends, Matthew Josephson and Malcolm Cowley, who had taken over the journal from its founder, Harold Loeb. Crane was wary of being seen ‘in relation’ to any particular aesthetic programme, both for the sake of the development of his own art and his reception in contemporary circles. Crane’s letters to Munson show his keenness to resist group affiliation and his aversion to Munson’s ‘rigorous’ aesthetic ‘program’. As Crane told Munson shortly before his December letter severed their friendship, his poetry required ‘a certain amount of “confusion” to bring [it] into form’, which was, he wrote, in conflict with the ‘program’ Munson had designed for Secession.

Crane appeared in a roll call of transatlantic periodicals that were crucial to the development and dissemination of various strands of literary modernism between his first publication in September 1916 and 27 April 1932, when Crane went overboard from the SS Orizaba, en route from Vera Cruz to New York. During his sixteen-year career, Crane amassed 109 publications in 26 journals, and published two volumes of poetry, White Buildings (1926) and The Bridge (1930), with a third, Key West, in draft at the time of his death.