Because he uses theatrical techniques that have been identified with postmodern theatre, Sam Shepard is often written of as a postmodern playwright. Certainly his theatrical techniques have much in common with those of the postmodern theatre. His stage reality is layered and fragmented, his characters sometimes intersubjective and transformational. He juxtaposes borrowings from and allusions to popular culture with those of history and high culture in an often free-form, playful way. He often uses sets that call attention to the theatre's existence as theatre, and invites acting techniques that call attention to the actor as performer and the play as performance. All of this Shepard shares with his postmodern contemporaries. His conception of the playwright's art, however, is far from the distant, ironic stance of the postmodern artist. In fact, as Michael Early has pointed out, Shepard has a great affinity with the American Romanticism of nineteenth-century Transcendentalists like Emerson and Whitman. Unlike theirs, however, Shepard's is a dark Romanticism, closer to the Gothic imagination of Poe or the cosmic despair of Melville than to the Transcendental optimism of Emerson or Whitman. What he chiefly has in common with the Romantics is his sense of the artistic imagination, his awe for his own gift and his compulsion to understand it.