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Shakespeare And Experimental American Poetry, Alan Golding

Faculty Scholarship

Why the particular emphasis proposed in my title on Shakespeare’s importance for experimental or avant-garde American poetry? We can take Shakespeare’s significance for American poetry generally, as for most writers in the English language, as a given. One can certainly trace Shakespeare’s presence in a wide range of more mainstream twentieth-century poetry, from John Berryman to Anthony Hecht to Sylvia Plath, and anthologies of poetic responses to Shakespeare abound. But the use of the ultimate canonical Anglophone writer by experimental poets dedicated to changing the context of writing and reception in their own time raises some interesting questions not just …