Objectivism

Objectivist poetry: meaning

The Imagist movement and the poetry it aimed at is perhaps best summarised in the famous one-line poem by Ezra Pound titled ‘In a Station of the Metro’ (1913):

There is evidence in this poem of the economy of words, the simplicity and sincerity, and the ‘objectification’ found in the poems of the objectivists. Re-read the poem. You can almost feel the reality, the object that is being depicted. It is this kind of poetry which laid the groundwork for what would become Objectivism.

The poet Louis Zukofsky was influenced by the movement and struck up a correspondence with Ezra Pound, the prime mover in the Imagist movement. As he had done with T.S. Eliot, Pound encouraged Zukofsky to publish some of his poems. In response, Zukofsky wrote an essay about Pound’s book-length poem, Cantos.

Objectivist poetry originated in the poems of four Americans: George Oppen, Charles Reznikoff, Carl Rakosi and Louis Zukofsky. There are two key words when it comes to defining Objectivist poetry. These words are: objectification and sincerity. Objectification means, in terms used by Zukofsy and illustrated by Ezra Pound, ‘musical shapes’.¹ It has to do with being able to feel, or experience in some way, the reality to which the poem refers in the poem itself. The poem should have an ‘object-like, tangible form as if language were material’.²

The aims of Objectivism were summarised in 1930 in a letter from Louis Zukofsky to Harriet Monroe, who had offered him 30 pages of the journal Poetry (1931) and told him he could add whatever he wanted. Zukofsky’s reply included the line, ‘The energies of words are hard to find – I should want my issue to be entirely a matter of the energies of words’.¹

That is to say that the early modernists like T.S. Eliot influenced the Objectivists, who wrote poetry which in many ways anticipated the postmodernists.

The Objectivists were hardly a coherent group and differed in their interpretation of the term (objectivist) which defined them. That said, they did have some things in common: a free verse format, a certain ‘particularity’ in relation to history, and they resisted the formal rules of poetry.² The objectivists as a group used ‘the utmost precision in the use of language and the most careful adherence to the facts of perception’.²

Objectivism: examples

As the founding member of the Objectivists, it will be useful, to begin with examples of Zukofsky's own poetry before looking at the poetry of a couple of others.

Zukofsky

Zukofsky was a Russian Jew and is most famous for his poem, 'A’. This is a long poem, and we will only look at a few lines from it, 'A'-12 (1959):

There is a musicality to the flow of words, to their rhythm, and to the way the words are organised on the page.

Reznikoff

Charles Reznikoff was also Jewish. Here are a few lines from his poem ‘Depression’ (1976):

The simplicity of George Oppen’s poetry makes a valuable contribution to objectivist poetry as a whole. He emphasised ‘clarity over formal structure and rhyme’.⁷ A few lines from ‘And Their Winter and Night Disguise’ (1968) will illustrate this clearly enough:

Oppen published numerous collections of poems. Throughout his works, he has maintained what has been called a ‘lean and precise’ approach.³

Oppen’s poem ‘Exodus’ provides our final example of Objectivist poetry:

Objectivism criticism

Several of the objectivist poets left poetry for politics, especially communist politics.

As a group, they were not well received. In fact, they didn’t come back to any kind of prominence until much later, during the 1960s. But their influence was felt. Using day-to-day words and language forms remains a staple of modern poetry.