On Louis Zukofsky
Autobiography is as good a place as any for new readers of Zukofsky to begin. Its warning is direct, a caution sign to those who would do other than read the words of the poet. Its gifts, its songs, tell the reader of the poet's achievement: an art of precision, intellectual range, simplicity, and, above all, of grace.
Mathematicians are fond of using the word "elegance" to signify the sum of such characteristics. It is, in many ways, the perfect word to express the totality of effect Zukofsky's work achieves, for even on those occasions when the poet misses the mark … one is convinced of the irreducible quality of the language. But by bringing in the idea of elegance at this point I have something more in mind, the variety of ways in which Zukofsky's poetry can be imaged as a series of processes, movements, and equations which have their most immediate analogies in mathematics. I do not wish to imply that his poetry is inordinately difficult, nor do I wish to suggest that Zukofsky moves into abstraction. To the contrary, Zukofsky is strongly motivated by a desire to simplify, to bring the form of his work down to its most precise dimension. In this respect, his poetry shares with modern American poetry the same tendency: to produce a "plain stile." But Zukofsky characteristically deals with complex issues, and in that respect he is quite different from most of his contemporaries. Or, to put the point another way, he is at once our most "intellectual" of poets and one of our most "simple."… Zukofsky has learned much from the example of the natural sciences, to which he has been receptive, exceedingly. He has seen in them vital correspondences to his own art, and references to them occur with startling regularity…. (pp. 77-8)
But Zukofsky's comments [in his critical essays] have neither the arrogance of the poet cum scientist … nor the stridency of the poet discovering a new field to be "used" in his writing…. Rather, they possess an essential rightness as well as a remarkable accuracy. Happily, also, the words lead somewhere; that is, this is not merely poetics, not a lovely theory contained within what has become an autonomous sub-genre. That poetry is measure, that poetry is, in part, a system of relationships and recurrences, that poetry is, or ought to be, concerned with the most minute particles of human expression—these are verities demonstrated throughout Zukofsky's work. (p. 79)
Zukofsky has gone far beyond his contemporaries both in his knowledge of music and in his application; only Wallace Stevens comes to mind as a near parallel in this respect. Three levels of accomplishment can be distinguished, what I will call the purely sonic, the compositional, and the structural. The first, the sonic, is least important. It consists simply of the use of device, alliteration, assonance, rhyme, phrasing, and so forth. Common enough, though it should be remarked that Zukofsky, a master at it, is an exceedingly graceful poet who has a strong drive to restore the lyric poem to its status as song. Examples abound in his work: lightly written valentines, airs, occasional poems, dedicatory poems. The second, the compositional, is more complex, more rare in modern poetry, or in poetry in general, and more difficult to accomplish. It consists in the creation of complex pieces traditional to the histories of poetry and music. Zukofsky's latitude in this mode is great. He has written, among other things, canzoni, sestinas, madrigals, motets, and a partita … involving a saraband, toccata, air, gigue, and courante. The matter here is not simply that of tradition as opposed to innovation; it is, as "Mantis" indicates, a matter of a poet getting maximum use out of proven forms. The third mode, the structural, involves the use of musical technique and means of organization over the long haul. It involves the use of the accumulated intelligence of music to bring cohesion to a vast structure.
"A" is the title of the long poem Zukofsky began writing in 1928 and which is presently nearing completion. The fact of a modern long poem being finished is itself a literary event—consider The Bridge, the Cantos, Paterson, and the Maximus poems—but that is of secondary importance. What is of the utmost importance is that "A" possesses … a remarkable coherence, a startling luminosity of structure…. "A" is indeed the "poem of a life," and in reading it one understands why Zukofsky is so impatient with presenting the facts of his life in different contexts. He has obviously worked at giving his history shape for nearly fifty years. And indeed [, as the poet says in the forward to "A" 1-12,] "Bach is a theme all thru it." (pp. 82-3)
In terms of the overall structure of the poem, Bach recurs as much more than a narrative ploy. In fact, aside from Zukofsky's use of the special forms developed or perfected by the composer, it can be argued that "A" is our most advanced literary fugue, occupying in literature a position similar to that occupied in music by Bach's The Art of the Fugue. (pp. 84-5)
Perhaps the most admirable thing about Zukofsky is that he appears to have achieved a remarkable sense of himself as poet and as man, as adventuring intellect and as husband and father. To a great degree, his work is an extension and deepening of the chief tendencies of twentieth century poetry. To an equal degree, though, his work reveals a different though complementary direction, a centripetal thrust which consolidates aesthetic/moral value in home and family. He is a poet whose work, even while it is involved in breaking new ground, always points back to the family…. (p. 86)
With all his other achievements taken into account, the special yield of Zukofsky is a poetry of grace and harmony. These are unfashionable qualities, at least in the twentieth century. Similarly, the "normalcy" of his family life will strike some readers as peculiar. But harmony is the lynchpin, nevertheless. Zukofsky's love poetry is quite unusual in our time, it must be admitted, though this is scarcely a criticism of Zukofsky. We are not accustomed to such poems as the "1959 Valentine," which functions on the levels of pure simplicity and pure grace:
The more that—
who? the world
seeks me so
to speak
the more
will I
seek
you….
His intellectual range, on the other hand …, is of a sort we are, again, unaccustomed to in our time. As much as his love poetry, his absorption of musical theory and modern science marks him as a distinctive voice. (pp. 86-7)
Philip R. Yannella, "On Louis Zukofsky," in Journal of Modern Literature (© Temple University 1974), Vol. 4, No. 1, September, 1974, pp. 74-87.
Get Ahead with eNotes
Start your 48-hour free trial to access everything you need to rise to the top of the class. Enjoy expert answers and study guides ad-free and take your learning to the next level.
Already a member? Log in here.