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Ezra Pound, “In a Station of the Metro”

Though they had rather different poetic sensibilities, Pound and Cummings are both important figures in twentieth-century avant-garde poetry.

William Carlos Williams, “This Is Just to Say”

Williams was active during the same period as Cummings, and he took yet another approach to poetic experimentation.

William Shakespeare, Shakespeare’s Sonnets

“i carry your heart with me” is a love sonnet, and it seems important to situate his idiosyncratic twentieth-century take on this form in relation to the most influential practitioner of the love sonnet. Shakespeare’s sonnets are legendary—and complex, and mysterious—examples of the form.

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