Bernstein 107: "For American poetry of the twentieth century, there is no more important fact than the fundamental alteration of the language base--who was speaking and how they spoke--that occurred in the 1880s and 1890s; indeed, it is perhaps that period's most lasting legacy for our literature"
108: "Stein, William Carlos Williams, and Louis Zukofsky--three poets who created a ground for twentieth-century poetry--all learned English as a second language"
Zukofsky--Yiddish
Williams "probably learned Spanish and English simultaneously"
Stein grew up in Vienna, had a Czech tutor and an Hungarian governess and probably spoke her first words in German; from four to six she lived in Paris
146: "Why were these poets able to create a new world in English, a new word for what they called America? It's both what they heard in their own coming to English, learning to speak it, and also what they heard in the opacity of English as foreign and at the same time as a fullness of sound. Not something to be translated away but something to enter into, to inhabit without losing the wildness, the ineffable largesse and poetry, of hearing without mastering or commanding"