W&M ScholarWorks Undergraduate Honors Theses Theses, Dissertations, & Master Projects 9-2011 An American Troubadour: The Career and Life of Alfred Kreymborg as a Modernist and Beyond Benjamin Dwight Norris College of William and Mary Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.wm.edu/honorstheses Recommended Citation Norris, Benjamin Dwight, "An American Troubadour: The Career and Life of Alfred Kreymborg as a Modernist and Beyond" (2011). Undergraduate Honors Theses. Paper 444. https://scholarworks.wm.edu/honorstheses/444 This Honors Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses, Dissertations, & Master Projects at W&M ScholarWorks. It has been accepted for inclusion in Undergraduate Honors Theses by an authorized administrator of W&M ScholarWorks. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Norris 1 An American Troubadour: The Career and Life of Alfred Kreymborg as a Modernist and Beyond In his Prologue to Kora in Hell in 1920, William Carlos Williams positions Alfred Kreymborg as a central figure in the development of experimental American poetry, asserting, “The best thing that could happen for the good of poetry in the United States today would be for someone to give Alfred Kreymborg a hundred thousand dollars. In his mind there is the determination for freedom brought into relief by a crabbedness of temper that makes him peculiarly able to value what is being done here” (Williams, Kora in Hell 23). Over twenty years later, in an unpublished letter to Kreymborg, Archibald MacLeish writes, “Indeed, you are becoming a sort of mythical figure – the great granddaddy of American literature.