[Symons has been highly praised for his contributions to the genres of biography and detective fiction. His popular biographies of Charles Dickens, Thomas Carlyle, and his brother A. J. A. Symons are considered excellent introductions to those writers. Symons is better known, however, for such crime novels as The Immaterial Murder Case (1945), The Thirtyfirst of February (1950), and The Progress of a Crime (1960). In the following essay, he disparages Zukofsky's verse, labeling it insubstantial. ]

An
orange
our
sun
fire
pulp

whets
us
(everyday)
for
us
eat
it
its
fire's
unconsumed

That is the opening of 'A-14' which continues for fifty pages, and is the chief item in a special Louis Zukofsky number of Poetry (Chicago) published recently. What can be said about such writing? Well, one of the things that has been said is that:

'The melody of these pieces—a monodic line in which the meanings of words are dispersed variably as and with actual notes—is a matter of "the continuous and complete statement of the words", and in this sense [his own] all of Zukofsky's short poems are, also, songs.'

'A-14' is not a short poem, but that hardly matters because another admirer points out that Zukofsky's aim is to write one poem all his life, 'a continuing song', so that 'it all is'. Criticism of Zukofsky's work is carried on by such semi-mystical phrases or by clichés wrapped in pedantry (since he believes that he has been writing only one poem all his life 'no division of its own existence can be thought of as being more or less than its sum'). Zukofsky is fashionable, he has been imitated in America (although not in this country), and it is as difficult to criticize him in rational terms as it is to criticize those non-art paintings which stimulate writers in the weeklies to a perfect frenzy of explanation by the very fact that they are so totally lacking in content. Say that a few random lines on a canvas are a fraud upon the body of art and you are equated with Munnings, say that Zukofsky's writing is worthless and you are lined up with Jack Squire's remark about The Waste Land that 'a grunt would have done as well'. Yet the effort at criticism should be made. 'Chicolini may look like an idiot, he may sound like an idiot, but don't be deceived', says Rufus T. Firefly in Duck Soup. 'He really is an idiot.' In the same way Zukofsky's writing, which seems to mean so little, really does mean very little. Behind it is a theory, not of art but of non-art.

The theory is called Objectivism, and it is based partly upon William Carlos Williams's phrase: 'No ideas but in things.' The poet should write about 'things', he should not deal in abstractions. But 'things' of course are denoted by words, and so it is a further tenet of Objectivism that words are objects in themselves. They exist independently of the clutter of extra-objective meanings attached to them and if they can be used freshly, as a child might use them who attaches words immediately to objects, such vision will produce a new poetry. No Objectivist critic would put the matter so simply and indeed, such critics write with a dense crudeness which makes it extremely difficult to understand exactly what they mean. They show also a liking for abstraction remarkable in those who proclaim the importance of the object, and they have Queen Victoria's liking for underlining words by way of emphasis. How is this for pompous and obscure abstraction?

'By arrangement (structure) words are real-ized, substantialized, become tangible as feeling—the rhythmical and syntactical texture of awareness in this poetry is as dense as any texture of "things" (which doesn't imply any necessary "imitation" in the sense of resemblance), as much there as the world is.'

Objectivist theory is very similar to Imagist theory, with object substituted for image. It was the belief of the Imagists that the image was a thing-in-itself, so that a poem might ideally consist of a succession of images. In the same way the Objectivist starts from the thing represented by a word and extends this so that we see 'word succeed word like the sections of a telescope opening'. In the lines already quoted the sun is an orange, it is fire, the orange is pulp, when we eat the orange the fire of the sun is unconsumed, etc. Neither Imagist nor Objectivist practice is as pure as the theory. In practice the threads of extra-objective meaning hanging on to words cannot be cut off, and poets don't seriously try to cut them off. Movements like Imagism and Objectivism may be interesting and useful set against the texture of their times—Imagism had a revolutionary impact on those brought up to the banalities of Georgian verse—but seen in any wider context they are very limiting heresies. Poetry, like other arts, involves a perpetual struggle between the need for control and the urge towards anarchic freedom, and a freedom like that of Whitman is meaningful because it both extends and recognizes the rhythmic limits of language. To advance the supremacy of an object like the orange-sun, and then to call work produced in the service of such a theory 'a continuing song' is to deny the meaning of words. In practice Objectivism is not a reaction from tradition like Imagism, but merely a small symptom of breakdown in Western culture.

It often happens that a writer's work is more interesting than the theory inspiring it, and in fact there are aspects of Zukofsky's poetry that have nothing to do with Objectivist theory. They don't, however, give additional depth to his writing, but on the contrary reveal that what Objectivism covers is in his case an almost total lack of talent.

The most obvious of his poetic devices is the feeble verbal joke, strongly reminiscent of old Ez at his worst:

This pointless parody of 'To Helen' ends with an acknowledgment:

Poe,
Gentlemen, don'chewknow,
But never wrote an epic.

There are constant echoes of Pound, of Cummings, of all the corny make-it-newness that marks one kind of modern American verse:

A Sans Francisco chronicle.
The voice of the West.

Paternity: 2 men say
They want boy
'I'm the father',

Both men say.

Kruschev
won't debate
satellite.

This is a poem called 'Hard Lines'. It is marvellously subtle, is it not, that substitution of ¢ San Francisco chronicle' for the San Francisco Chronicle? On such a quizzical, folksy plane, wisely ignored by most of his admirers, much of Zukofsky's poetry is conceived. (And incidentally, if it is true, as Robert Creeley says, that 'Zukofsky feels that one writes the same poem all one's life and it is purposeless to try to say "Gee, you know, I wrote a great poem in '56 and now I've written a bad poem in 1963",' why are his poems printed separately?) A very few poems (like 'During the Passaic Strike of 1926') are romantic pieces expressing radical revolt in old-fashioned language. There are witty fragments, like the beginning of 'D.R.':

Comrade D.R.—
His murals speak:
Executives of industry,

Rich stone heads
Conferring at tables,
We peasants and

Workers, our faces
Becoming us more
Than frescoes of saints

Marshal to say:
We are the
Heads over industry.

But there are no more than half a dozen such fragments in [All: The Collected Short Poems, 1923-1958]. The great bulk of Zukofsky's writing is so devoid of rhythmical interest and intelligence, and its content is such a dreary would-be informal and matey droning about life and the infinite, that it is practically unreadable. The hero of an unpublished satirical poem now going the rounds comes to mind:

To pull through one of Zukofsky's long poems in which the words, rarely more than three to a line, move down the pages as though spurted from a water pistol, jerking from one subject to another and one tone to another, here solemnly abstract, there derived from other writers, there again incurably facetious, is a more unrewarding exercise than reading the whole of Paterson. The 'patterns of speech' which Williams's admirers claim that he has discovered and which Zukofsky is said to have developed, simply do not exist in any form of recognizable poetic interest. It is always significant, and ominous, when critics start talking about one art in terms of another, and Zukofsky's admirers constantly explain his work in terms of music. 'Zukofsky's mode "sees" musical structure in words' is a typical remark. But why should a poem have a musical structure of this kind—or is this a way of avoiding the admission that it has no poetic structure? In the end it is impossible even to discuss Zukofsky's work in detail because it dissolves under any sort of analysis into facetiousness or incoherence. One can only demonstrate. This is the end of ' A-14':

(mouth?)—
exult
tally,
wiggle
exult
tally
(one;
three)
Sun
eye

Put beside such writing another comment by an admirer: 'Zukofsky's understanding/feeling of existence as shape (melody) at least gives us words as emotionally active as substance, existence, itself.' Consider such a quotation, consider the sort of verse it refers to, and ask: Does the verse have any interest, does the quotation have any meaning?