[Davie is a highly regarded English poet, critic, educator, and translator. During the 1950s he was associated with the Movement, a group of poets who emphasized restrained language, traditional syntax, and the moral and social implications of poetic content. In the following review of All: The Collected Short Poems, 1923-1958, Davie compares Zukofsky both to writers of the 1930s who apotheosized intellect and the manipulation of language and to the tradition represented by Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams.]

For those who need to know that Picasso could draw a likeness if he chose, Exhibit A is Zukofsky after Sir Charles Sedley:

Would he had writ thus always? Hardly. The high gloss on this elegant pastiche obscures rather than clarifies—certainly on a first reading and even on a second: the suavity of the phrasing conceals its compactness, although it is the compactness that makes the poem both difficult and rewarding. "Like me," for instance, means both "such as I have" and "such as they (our hastes) have in me." Again, the colon after the first quatrain explains "them" as being "this hurrying world" and "our hastes"; and yet when it turns out that these are the joint subject of another sentence, we make a rapid retrospective adjustment, and read "them" as the speaker's doings and beings ("what I do or am"). And this is not to mention the elusive sense of the faces that stop showing what they crave. This is a language to which the norms of prose syntax are essential (hence the very sedulous punctuation), though it breaks the norms even as it respects them.

Zukofsky respects and uses grammar because many of his poems, early and late, are tight argumentative affairs. And this means that, although he belongs in the Poundian tradition with which he aligns himself, he is quite often within hailing distance of a quite distinct tradition which for a long time was more influential among us—the wit writing of Allen Tate, say, or William Empson. As Empson writes about cleaning his teeth into a lake while camping out, so Zukofsky addresses his washstand and, through elliptical allusions to designs half-glimpsed in accidental scratchings on its marble tiles, he comes to the noble humaneness of Empson at his best:

The Empsonian or "new" criticism ought to have appreciated the many poems by Zukofsky which are dense with compressed conceits in the 17th-century manner, or (as with a piece about barberries in snow) in the not ultimately different manner of Hopkins. But in fact that criticism ignored Zukofsky, and among his peers it was Pound and Williams who appreciated and helped.

The ties which bind him to Pound are thus in the first place personal and grateful. But he is indebted to Pound also for concepts and preoccupations, as appears from the notes which in one or two cases he appends to poems. And not only concepts but perceptions also come to him sometimes from the same source, as in a poem about a privet leaf in winter, which ends:

Surely the most Poundian lines not written by Pound!

But above all what aligns Zukofsky with Pound and Williams, what removes him from the world of wit writing, is his concern, first and last, with the musical measure of verse. The poem about the washstand is in places obscure. But it is less obscure than the poem after Sedley which at first seems so straightforward. And it is less obscure because, being so much further from counting off syllables to the verse line, it can use line endings, as apparent on the printed page and to the listening ear, to compel meaningful inflections:

This is rudimentary. Zukofsky's more elaborated music offers itself most frankly in the opulent orchestration of a poem to Tibor Serly, midway in a first section [of All: The Collected Short Poems, 1923-58] headed "55 Poems 1923-1935." (This poem is still full of witty conceits, and excellent ones.) It is at its most elusive in the section "Anew 1935-1944," where it most often eludes me—and for reasons which are made clear:

The lines of this new song are nothing
But a tune making the nothing full
Stonelike become more hard than silent
The tune's image holding in the line.

In the longest poem in the collection, "4 Other Countries" from Barely and Widely 1956-1958, the music, in its double aspect of submerged half rhyme and of spaced intervals at the ends of short lines, makes for astonishingly compact expression, and this vindicates more than one would have thought possible, that inherently unsatisfactory form, the poem as travelogue.