Louis Zukofsky is one of the most important poets of my generation. Like Richard Eberhart, Kenneth Patchen, Muriel Rukeyser, he has been for many years independent of organized literary fashions, a genuinely individual, even idiosyncratic, writer. In 1930 most qualified judges would have put him in the first rank. Then came the Great Depression and World War II and the Proletarians and Reactionaries were having at each other in American poetry, and Zukofsky went into disfavor and obscurity. Today he is again popular with young writers.

Ill-informed critics have often dismissed him as being merely a disciple of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, the latter especially. This is really just an abusive cliché. Actually, Zukofsky's style is part of a worldwide movement of anti-Symbolism. I believe that this movement is the mainstream of twentieth-century poetry, and it is obvious that American verse after a period of political divagation is coming back to it.

[The poems in Some Time] are, almost without exception, of domestic occasion, some of them are even Valentine's Day gifts, wry, bright gestures of intimacy. One or two are best described as knotty, gnarled epic-elegies of the mind struggling with reality. This is a world in which Zukofsky is perhaps most himself and in which his Chasidic heritage comes to the fore. Most of these poems, however, are quite the opposite, exercises in absolute clarification, crystal cabinets full of air and angels. I very much doubt if any book of verse more important or moving (or more exemplary and instructive to the young) is likely to be published for some time.