The Oxford Companion to English Literature | Zukofsky, Louis
Zukofsky, Louis
(
1904
–
78
), American poet, born in the Yiddish melting pot of New York. In
1931
with
Pound
's sponsorship he edited the ‘Objectivists’ issue of
Poetry
, Chicago, followed in
1932
by An ‘Objectivists’ Anthology, featuring among others
Carl
Rakosi
,
George
Oppen
, and
B.
Bunting
.
Zukofksy's
lyrics, collected in the Complete Short Poetry (
1991
), are vividly textual, often witty, always stylish and lapidary. They are challenging and opaque or else clear as crystal. Like many of his contemporaries a deep philosophical puzzlement also attaches to his work, finally making it some of the most intellectually inimitable in the US canon. The hermeneutic drive within Objectivism, differentiating it from
Imagism
's lyric base, is fully explored in
Zukofsky's
long poem A, a paean to his nuclear family. Written over 45 years in 24 categorical parts, A shows...
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