The Objectivists were a loose-knit group of second-generation Modernist poets who emerged in the 1930s, members of a poetic movement within the broader movement of literary Modernism known as Objectivism. The group consisted primarily of American nationals and was influenced by Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, among other contemporaneous writers. The basic tenets of Objectivist poetics, as defined by Louis Zukofsky, were to treat the poem as an object and to emphasize sincerity, intelligence, and the poet's ability to look clearly at the world. While the name of the movement is the same as that of Ayn Rand's school of philosophy, the two movements are not affiliated.
The core group consisted of the Americans Zukofsky, Williams, Charles Reznikoff, George Oppen and Carl Rakosi, and the British poet Basil Bunting. Later, another American poet, Lorine Niedecker, became associated with the group. A number of other poets were included in early publications under the Objectivist rubric without actually sharing the attitudes and approaches to poetry of this core group. Although these poets generally suffered critical neglect, especially in their early careers, and a number of them abandoned the practice of writing and/or publishing poetry for a time, they were to prove highly influential for later generations of writers working in the tradition of modernist poetry in English.
Roots The period 1909 to 1913 saw the emergence of Imagism, the first consciously avant garde movement in 20th century English-language poetry. Pound, who was Imagism's prime mover, served as foreign editor of Harriet Monroe's magazine Poetry. In October 1912, he submitted three poems each by H.D. and Richard Aldington under the label Imagiste. Aldington's poems were printed in the November issue, and H.D.'s appeared in the January 1913 issue. The March 1913 issue of Poetry also contained Pound's A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste and F. S. Flint's essay Imagisme. This publication history meant that this London-based movement had its first readership in the United States. It also meant that Imagism was available as a model for American Modernist poets of the next generation.
Zukofsky was one such poet. He published a poem in Poetry in 1924 and introduced himself to Pound in 1927, when he sent the older poet his "Poem beginning 'The,'". Pound published the poem in his magazine The Exile, and a long correspondence and friendship between the two began. This relationship was strengthened by Zukofsky's 1929 essay on Pound's long work in progress The Cantos. Pound also provided an introduction to William Carlos Williams, a physician and poet who had been a classmate of Pound's while at the University of Pennsylvania and who lived in Rutherford, New Jersey, not far from Zukofsky. Zukofsky and Williams quickly became close friends and were to be literary collaborators for the rest of Williams's life. Another of Zukofsky's literary mentors at this period was Charles Reznikoff, a New York City poet whose early work was also influenced by Imagism. By 1928, the young American poet George Oppen and his wife Mary Oppen had become friendly with Zukofsky and Reznikoff. Another young American poet, Carl Rakosi, started corresponding with Pound around this time, and the older poet again recommended him to Zukofsky. The final member of the core group, Basil Bunting, was an English poet who came from a Quaker background and who had been imprisoned as a conscientious objector during World War I. In 1923, Bunting met Pound in Paris and the two men developed a close literary friendship, with Bunting living near Pound at Rapallo from 1931 to 1933. In 1930, Bunting published his first collection of poetry, Redimiculum Matellarum, and Pound introduced him to Zukofsky.
The term 'Objectivist' developed because Harriet Monroe insisted on a group name for the February 1931 issue of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, which Monroe had allowed Zukofsky to guest edit, at Pound's urging. Zukofsky recounts the occasion with Monroe in Prepositions: "Harriet Monroe at the time insisted, we'd better have a title for it, call it something. I said, I don't want to. She insisted; so, I said, alright, if I can define it in an essay, and I used two words, sincerity and objectification, and I was sorry immediately. But it's gone down into the history books; they forgot the founder, thank heavens, and kept the terms, and, of course, I said objectivist, and they said objectivism and that makes all the difference. Well, that was pretty bad, so then I spent the next thirty years trying to make it simple." It also seems that the core group did not see themselves as a coherent movement but rather as a group of individual poets with some shared approach to their art. As well as the matters covered in Zukofsky's essays, the elements of this approach included: a respect for Imagist achievement in the areas of vers libre and highly concentrated language and imagery; a rejection of the Imagists' interest in classicism and mythology; for Reznikoff, Zukofsky, Rakosi and Oppen, a shared Jewish heritage (which, for all but Oppen included an early childhood in which English was not their first language); generally left-wing, and, in the cases of Zukofsky, Rakosi, and Oppen at least, Marxist politics.
Early publications The first appearance of the group was in a special issue of Poetry magazine in February 1931; this was arranged for by Pound and edited by Zukofsky (Vol. 37, No. 5). In addition to poems by Rakosi, Zukofsky, Reznikoff, George Oppen, Basil Bunting and William Carlos Williams, Zukofsky included work by a number of poets who would have little or no further association with the group: Howard Weeks, Robert McAlmon, Joyce Hopkins, Norman Macleod, Kenneth Rexroth, S. Theodore Hecht, Harry Roskolenkier, Henry Zolinsky, Whittaker Chambers, Jesse Lowenthal, Emanuel Carnevali (as translator of Arthur Rimbaud), John Wheelwright, Richard Johns and Martha Champion. An appendix (Symposium) featured texts by Parker Tyler and Charles Henri Ford, with a note by Zukofsky, a text by Samuel Putnam and Zukofsky's translation of a short essay on the poetry of André Salmon by his friend René Taupin.
The issue also contained Zukofsky's essays Program: 'Objectivists' 1931 and Sincerity and Objectification: With Special Reference to the Work of Charles Reznikoff, a reworking of a study of Reznikoff's work originally written some time earlier. In this second essay, Zukofsky expands on the basic tenets of Objectivist poetics, stating that in sincerity "Writing occurs which is the detail, not mirage, of seeing, of thinking with the things as they exist, and of directing them along a line of melody", and that objectification relates to "the appearance of the art form as an object." This position echoes Pound's 1918 dictum (in an essay, "A Retrospective", in which he is looking back at Imagism) "I believe in technique as the test of a man's sincerity".
Some example poems
As an example, Zukofsky cites the following short section from A Group of Verse, a long poem sequence that was Reznikoff's contribution to the issue:
Among the heaps of brick and plaster lies a girder, still itself among the rubbish.
In which the girder among the rubbish represents –for Zukofsky– the poem as object, sincere in itself. Oppen continued to refer to these lines as a poetic touchstone as late as 1976, though he would often misremember them as "a girder, still itself among the rubble."
Oppen's own contribution was a poem titled "1930s", later collected (without the title) as the opening section of Oppen's first collection called Discrete Series, a book-length poem sequence. The knowledge not of sorrow, you were saying, but of boredom Is — aside from reading speaking smoking — Of what, Maude Blessingbourne it was, wished to know when, having risen, “approached the window as if to see what really was going on”; And saw rain falling, in the distance more slowly, The road clear from her past the window- glass — Of the world, weather-swept, with which one shares the century.
Of his own poetry, Zukofsky chose to include "A" — Seventh Movement, the first part of a six-page section from what was to become an 800-page poem. This extract takes as its subject a set of roadworks in the street outside his New York home: Horses: who will do it? out of manes? Words Will do it, out of manes, out of airs, but They have no manes, so there are no airs, birds Of words, from me to them no singing gut. For they have no eyes, for their legs are wood, For their stomachs are logs with print on them; Blood red, red lamps hang from necks or where could Be necks, two legs stand A, four together M. "Street Closed" is what print says on their stomachs; That cuts out everybody but the diggers; You're cut out, and she's cut out, and the jiggers Are cut out. No! we can't have such nor bucks As won't, tho they're not here, pass thru a hoop Strayed on a manhole — me? Am on a stoop. extract from "A"-7 by Louis Zukofsky
Language and poetry Another aspect of Objectivist poetics that is not explicitly addressed in these essays is an interest in exploiting the resonances of small, everyday words. As Zukofsky was to write some time later (in 1946), "a case can be made for the poet giving some of his life to the use of the words the and a: both of which are weighted with as much epos and historical destiny as one man can perhaps resolve. Those who do not believe this are too sure that the little words mean nothing among so many other words." This concern is also reflected in Oppen's statement "if we still possessed the word 'is', there would be no need to write poems".
Reaction Reaction to the issue was not uniformly welcoming, and the March 1931 issue of the magazine contained a hostile response by the editor herself under the title "The Arrogance of Youth". Monroe was particularly angered by Zukofsky's rejection of Edwin Arlington Robinson, Robert Frost, Edgar Lee Masters, and Edna St. Vincent Millay, all of whom were regular contributors to the magazine. However, not all reactions were so unfavorable; Niedecker read the issue at her local public library in Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin, and wrote to Zukofsky shortly thereafter, beginning a friendship and frequent literary correspondence that would last until her death 40 years later.
The Poetry issue was followed in 1932 by the Zukofsky-edited An 'Objectivist' Anthology. This anthology featured far fewer contributors: Basil Bunting, Mary Butts, Frances Fletcher, Robert McAlmon, George Oppen, Ezra Pound, Carl Rakosi, Kenneth Rexroth, Charles Reznikoff, William Carlos Williams, Louis Zukofsky and Forest Anderson, T. S. Eliot, R. B. N. Warriston and Jerry Reisman. The anthology served to highlight the differences between these poets as much as their shared attitudes to writing. Much of the difference stemmed from Zukofsky's insistence on form over content, which conflicted with many of the other poets' concern with the real world. As Rakosi would later write: "if Reznikoff was an Objectivist, Zukofsky is not and never was one."