>I'm with that, but I'd add Lee Harwood and Tom Raworth. Others e.g. Maggie O'Sullivan came later. Before Ashbery etc for me it was the French.
Yes, of course, I simplified for dramatic purposes. There was lots of new things going on in the late 1950s, not just Ashbery.
I don't know why it is that I have a comparative lack of interest in classic modernism, English language stylee -- I can't blame it all on bad teaching at uni. But in those days, like you, I read the first half of the 20th C more through poetry from elsewhere - Sodergran, Boye, Ekelof, Diktonius, Transtromer, Haavikko, Saarikoski, Pavese Montale Quasimodo, Celan, Holub, Rozewicz, mandelstam, reverdy, akhmatova...
The obvious explanation is a distaste for how all literary English speakers - Zukofsky, Stein, Lawrence, even Joyce and Beckett to an extent - were using the language in the period 1910 - 1950. At some level, my reading is persistently disrupted by a visceral feeling that could be crudely expressed as "You sound fake". That isn't my considered judgment, it comes out of what we hippies call the right brain not the left brain, and it's obviously my issue, but perhaps articulating it isn't wholly without interest.
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