In its wisdom [Zukofsky's] publisher is pushing Hugh Kenner's judgment that "A" is "the most hermetic poem in English, which they will still be elucidating in the 22nd century." They of course will be the descendants of Prof. Hugh Kenner and long may they thrive. In the meantime such a distinction is not likely to start a stampede to the bookshops of our post-modern day. Nor is it one, I think, that the poet himself would have coveted. Granted that his verse is, in Ezra Pound's phrase, "more thoughtful than toffee-lickers require," Zukofsky's own words seem more apropos: "the poem of a life—and a time."…

I have found "A" alternately and in no special order strange, beautiful, mad, touching, unreadable, readable, elusive, fascinating. Now that I have all 800 pages in hand … I see no reason to change my mind—except to say that in sum I respect and am moved by it all … the labor of one quiet, stubborn, possessed man's lifetime. It is a big poem in all senses. (p. 573)

Zukofsky's early poem "Poem Beginning 'The'"] about 100 lines shorter than The Waste Land (which in part it parodies), has—like that poem—helpful-cum-facetious notes [and] is divided into six "movements."… Written in 1926, it provides the best possible introduction to "A", begun two years later.

Partly a put-on of the modernist poem it also means to be, "'The'" comes fitted out with numbered lines, an exegete's delight. But while Eliot's notes were an afterthought and postscript, Zukofsky's are positively flaunted: a massed squadron of sources and line references confronts one just beneath the title at the threshold…. Among other things, "'The'" is a funny poem but along with the horseplay a central recognition is in the making: that the past, muffled and modified as it well may be, persists in the present; that its voices are neither lifeless souvenirs nor literary grace notes but presences that shape—remind, rebuke, foster—the living; that "my" voice therefore is not mine only, since others speak through me. The same point is made, of course, in The Waste Land and the Cantos, but in Zukofsky's case it is complicated by the fact that he speaks an acquired tongue [Zukofsky was the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants] and so, in assuming the language of "strangers," is disloyal to his own…. Caught between the claims of a small world and a larger, an old world and a new, past voices and an unsounded future, the protagonist of "'The'"—very much Louis Zukofsky—struggles to join and heal his divisions in a single song; this in fact is the plot of the poem. And its resolution—very tentative and conscience-hounded (the author is 22)—is phrased toward the end in the words of Peer Gynt:

             I must try to fare forth from here.
             I do not forget you,
             I am just gone out for to-night …

The story of this faring-forth, from 1928 almost to the death a half-century later, is the burden of "A".

As the high-spirited "'The'" began with the ("The / Voice of Jesus I. Rush singing / in the wilderness") so the soberer "A" begins mid-Depression with a ("A / Round of fiddles playing Bach")…. My dictionary says that a "connotes a thing not previously noted or recognized, as contrasted with the, which connotes a thing previously noted or recognized." The indefinite a, then, seems to be the correct article for faring, seeking and perhaps finding, the right sign for a poem in and about process, as "A".

The process begins on April 5, 1928 with a performance of the St. Matthew Passion at Carnegie Hall and ends decades later with a "masque" prepared by Celia Zukofsky, a five part score with Handel's Pièces pour le clavecin (the musical notes reproduced on the page) as one "voice," excerpts from her husband's various writings—criticism, drama, fiction, "A" itself—to be spoken, not sung, as the others. (pp. 573-74)

I find it difficult to give a sense of the shape as an objective whole but some of his "things," from a to Zion, are listed in an index at the back of the book. Others, unindexed but logged in my memory, include: the contents of a writer's desk drawer, depression (both economic and psychological) and recovery, Valentine's Day as a day of reckoning, the attendance of spirits at the summons of love, the scale of a "nuclear" family of three, the flickering vision of a comprehensive music ("One song / Of many voices") linking history and myth or the casual and the permanent, the finding of a lost child, words as sounds as much as sense, song's physical sensation, the longest meditation on record, the autobiography of "Anybody, but a particular Anybody."

I have two further impressions. The first is of a passion epitomized in a frequently quoted sentence from Plato: "If number, measure and weighing be taken away from any art, that which remains will not be much." In other words, no verse is gratuitous or "free" for Zukofsky, and "A" is a manual of ways and means of measuring, timing and counting out one's holdings. The second is of what might be called a cult of recurrence. "All art is made, I think, out of recurrence," he once said. "Each writer writes one long work whose beat he cannot be entirely aware of. Recurrences follow him, crib and drink from a well that's his cadence…."… The poet's note at the close of Celia's masque—his poem's last words in fact—may be read as a wish and a key for us:

                     the gift—
                     she hears
                     the work
                     in its recurrence.

The work in question—an "object" of 826 printed pages, 8 1/4 inches by 5 1/2 inches by 1 1/2 inches in size and weighing 2 1/4 pounds—is now for the first time available in its entirety. Its place is in the great line of American personal epic begun in Song of Myself and stretching through the Cantos, Paterson, Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction, Maximus and The Dream Songs.

It should be read. (p. 574)