‘They Have Been Lost’: A Year in Mexico City

Abstract

Chapter Five reassesses Crane’s final year, introducing a lost poem, ‘Nopal’ from his unrealised Mexican epic. By examining Crane’s publications from the late 1920s, Key West and his literary networks in Mexico during his Guggenheim Fellowship I am able to challenge the myth of the self-destructive poet in a year of creative drought. In the last years of his life, Crane published in nationally distributed, mass-circulation magazines, featuring in Vanity Fair in 1929, with poems in these periodicals consolidating his reputation. This chapter discusses Crane’s attempts to raise his profile as a reviewer, and his increasing interest in writing on visual arts, as demonstrated by his early essay on the photographer H.W. Mimms, pamphlet on David Siqueiros and Mexican murals – written following conversations with Ernie O’Malley, a leading republican intellectual in the Irish revolution and Civil War. Crane’s friendship with O’Malley provides a remarkable insight into Crane’s Mexico years and the literary and artistic networks between the Global South, the U.S. and the Irish Republic. Finally, I introduce a lost poem by Crane written in Mexico, ‘Nopal’.