In the half-century since their gradual re-emergence as publishing poets, a considerable amount of mythos has accreted around the second-generation Modernist poets known collectively as the “Objectivists.” Of all of the major groups or movements in 20th-century American poetry, the “Objectivists” are perhaps the most poorly understood and alongside the “Beats,” the most subject to mythologizing. Consequently, it is often difficult for the careful scholar to know whether one’s understanding of the group or its individual members is based on solid evidence.

Consider, for example, the extant critical biographies of Lorine Niedecker and Louis Zukofsky. These two poets were intimate friends, living together in New York City in the early- to mid-1930s and carrying on a rich, continuous, and voluminous correspondence for nearly 40 years until Niedecker’s death in 1970. Anyone who examines that correspondence is forced to conclude that theirs was a deep, complicated, extraordinary literary friendship. And yet, in Mark Scroggins’ otherwise excellent 2007 biography of Zukofsky, Niedecker is described at one point as “a very isolated and needy poet” whose “problematic correspondence” Zukofsky was happy to pawn off on the poet and publisher Cid Corman.¹The Poem of a Life, 321-322. On the other side of the coin, in Margot Peters’ 2011 Niedecker biography, Zukofsky is largely portrayed as an unsympathetic villain. Making matters worse, the critical edition of their letters which would establish a more accurate view of their relationship was prohibited from including Zukofsky’s side of the correspondence and has been out of print for the past twenty years, with used copies now selling for two hundred and fifty dollars. Even acknowledging the complicated reasons why things are as they are, the effect upon the average scholar’s understanding of either poet and their relationship is plainly deleterious.

Having now spent several years researching this group and their origins, I could cite several more examples of accepted commonplaces about the group and its members that I was surprised to find lacked empirical justification. This state of affairs is particularly ironic considering the group’s emphasis on fidelity to what Zukofsky called “historic and contemporary particulars.”²”Program: ‘Objectivists’ 1931,” Poetry 37.5 (February 1931): 268. Throughout this site I write about these poets as members of a group rather than as founders of a movement, using the term “Objectivist” (in quotations) to refer to the group and generally avoiding referencing objectivism, which simply did not exist as a movement during the 1920s and 1930s.³Whether objectivism emerged as a legitimate literary movement in the 1960s can be debated, but that question, while interesting, is not a primary concern of this site.

In our efforts to define and describe the “Objectivists” as a historical literary formation, we must take care to avoid two reductive though sometimes attractive temptations; namely, the backward projection of intention which appears plausible based on later events but which cannot be supported by particular historical evidence, and the presumption of a monolithic poetics. Despite several obvious opportunities to present a collaborative or mutually-endorsed statement of the group’s poetic values or critical aims, the group’s name and all of the early statements that can plausibly be read as defining or describing the group are attributable to just one member (Zukofsky)⁴These include his prose statements in the February and April 1931 issues of Poetry magazine as well as his preface to An “Objectivists” Anthology. There was never an “Objectivist” manifesto demanding allegiance, nor rules to obey or disregard, as there had been with Pound’s “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste.” As a consequence, there is no record of anyone, apart from Lorine Niedecker, joining the “group” following their initial appearance in 1931.

That there was no “Objectivist” movement available for interested readers or writers to join is notable, particularly in an era defined by political commitment and poetic movements. In the place of Zukofsky’s original multi-page prospectus for an author-led printing cooperative, consider the far more modest statement of purpose written by Reznikoff and printed on the dust jackets of the group’s books: “The Objectivist Press is an organization of poets who are printing their own work and that of others they think ought to be printed.” This might in fact be accurately spoken of as the only truly collaborative “Objectivist” statement of intention, simultaneously rigorous in its simplicity and remarkable for its seemingly deliberate evasion of any loyalty oaths, whether poetic or political. Thus a poet or a poem might be accurately regarded as “objectivist,” though it would be inaccurate to speak of “objectivism,” as their animating ideas were never fully developed, embraced, or adhered to.

This preference for ‘ists’ instead of an ‘ism’ is a function of both the group’s poetics and their epistemology. Zukofsky and his fellow “Objectivists” shared a mutual suspicion of abstraction, with an avowed preference for particulars.⁵This was an inheritance from Pound, whose counsel in “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste” had been: “Don’t use such an expression as ‘dim lands of peace.’ It dulls the image. It mixes an abstraction with the concrete. It comes from the writer’s not realizing that the natural object is always the adequate symbol. Go in fear of abstractions.” It follows, then, that they would have preferred to think of themselves in a similar vein, a collection of discrete particulars, as distinct practitioners of a particular craft, namely, the art of poetry. While they might in a certain light be regarded as the makers of poetic objects which shared certain formal and physical properties, it is not difficult to understand why Zukofsky bristled at their being regarded as interchangeable representatives of something so flattening as a movement. Crucially, this linguistic preference was not confined to Zukofsky, but shared by others in the original group; they were generally reluctant, even in interviews conducted through the 1960s and 1970s, to encourage or identify with any suggestions of ‘objectivism.’

It should also be emphasized that these writers were decidedly un-“clubbable,” by virtue of both their identity positions (especially their Jewishness and proximity to being immigrants) and their own dispositions. While they built and maintained deep human friendships built upon shared loves and mutual struggles, none of them were much for organizations or hierarchical social structures.⁶Bunting was perhaps the least “clubbable” and most deliberately irascible poet of the 20th century, of whom John Seed has written perceptively: “the critical force of some of Bunting’s thirties poetry comes precisely from its refusal of the comforts of a communal faith of any kind. He preferred an unillusioned use of his own senses” (“Irrelevant Objects: Basil Bunting’s Poetry of the 1930s” in The Objectivist Nexus, 140) This is a rather elegant way of saying that Bunting was an antagonistic skeptic who was uninterested in the confounding of art and schemes designed for social improvement, which is entirely true. As their complex relationship to the social and political organizations which characterized the political left during their lifetimes made clear, nearly all of them struggled to subsume their individual convictions within any larger group affiliations, even those they felt socially or politically necessary.⁷Zukofsky, though an intellectually committed Marxist, never formally joined the Communist Party, for example, and while both Rakosi and the Oppen did, neither lasted long as members, nor did either feel comfortable mixing their political activism and poetic activity. Both poets valued their artistic independence too strongly to submit their craft to party discipline. Feelings ranging from ambivalence and outright antipathy towards political parties and large organizations more generally can be clearly seen in each of the other core “Objectivists.” If we expand our interest to include peripheral members of the group, this tendency towards heterodox Communism becomes even more apparent, with the “Objectivists” including a larger than expected number of Trotskyites and early defectors from the mainline Stalinist party. This is not to say that members of the group did not share a set of political ideals, literary values or critical aims, simply that they made no concerted effort to broadcast a shared viewpoint.

This is why Zukofsky, generally precise even at his prickliest and most revisionist, could claim in speaking with L.S. Dembo in 1968 that when Harriet Monroe informed him that

‘You must have a movement.’ I said, “No, some of us are writing to say things simply so that they will affect us as new again.” “Well, give it a name.” Well, there were pre-Raphaelitism, and dadaism, and expressionism, and futurism—I don’t like any of those isms. I mean, as soon as you do that, you start becoming a balloon instead of a person. And it swells and a lot of mad people go chasing it.⁸”Louis Zukofsky,” Contemporary Literature (Spring 1969), 203.

The implicit criticism here, of course, is that anyone who would insist on examining or exploring ‘objectivism’ as a movement is faddish and insane. Well, then! It is true that this insistence on poetic autonomy and the absence of a galvanizing statement of praxis around which a movement could have coalesced has contributed to some dispute over the precise meaning of the term “Objectivist” and who it ought to apply to, even amongst group members. Carl Rakosi, for instance, would later state that he regarded Lorine Niedecker, who was not included in either of the “Objectivists” original publications, as the purest example of an “Objectivist”⁹Rakosi told Kimberly Bird in 2002: “Niedecker, by the way, was not a part of it at this time. I think I was the one really who first called her an Objectivist, because I thought that she was the most Objectivist of us all, and she is” (A Century in the Poetic Eye, 71) and told George Evans and August Kleinzahler in 1988 that “No one name would have fit us all. By restricting the meaning of Objectivist to a poet’s process, however, Zukofsky was able to get around the difficulty and not exclude himself, for the things he pointed out in Reznikoff which were Objectivist did not describe his own work. No, if Reznikoff was an Objectivist, Zukofsky was not.”¹⁰”An Interview with Carl Rakosi,” Conjunctions 11 (1988), 221. It should be noted that Rakosi was not present in New York City in the late 1920s and early 1930s, and thus only had contact with Zukofsky via letters. Consequently, some of his recollections about the initial character of the group may be less accurate than those made by participants in the early meetings. Such bickering about group identities, however, is not uncommon, particularly among poets, and does not disprove the existence of a plausible group.¹¹See Kenneth Rexroth’s famously dismissive (and possibly apocryphal) riposte to a Time magazine article designating him the “father of the ‘Beats'”: “An entomologist is not a bug” (quoted in the introduction to The Complete Poems of Kenneth Rexroth, xxvi). More troubling than Zukofsky’s twinned assertions that he had never intended to describe anything like a movement and that there had never been such a thing as objectivism, however, is his assertion that “the objectivist, then, is one person, not a group.”¹²”Louis Zukofsky”, Contemporary Literature 10:2 (Spring 1969): 205.

No matter how much we may sympathize with Zukofsky’s efforts to clear his terminology of unwanted associations and his principled insistence on being read as a particular who takes care in his works for other particulars, taking this objection too literally would do disservice to the historical record. Zukofsky may not have approved of how the label he reluctantly invented was later applied, but “Objectivists” remains, in my view, the best and most accurate appellation for the seven writers considered here. In this, I concur with Tom Sharp, whose has argued that “agreement on fundamental principles need not (and did not) imply surrender of individual character or practice. Zukofsky’s statement that he was never a member of the group of ‘Objectivists’—in the light of such fundamentals—could only be credited to misunderstanding and personal differences.”¹³While preparing this site, I discovered and was greatly impressed by Sharp’s dissertation, a sustained empirical examination of “Objectivist” relations in the late 1920s and early 1930s. We corresponded, and in 2015, Sharp asked for and received the necessary permissions to place a slightly updated version of the work online, where it can now be read at http://sharpgiving.com/Objectivists/sections/01.history.html. Without chasing after a balloon filled with false assumptions (i.e. the notion of “objectivism” as a historically durable, intentionally programmed poetic movement), the preponderance of evidence suggests that the poets gathered here as “Objectivists” did in fact comprise a coherent group by virtue both of several shared aesthetic affinities and of repeated efforts to publish each other’s work.

What were these shared aesthetic affinities? Most efforts to understand an “Objectivist” poetics must with Zukofsky’s prose statements in Poetry and An “Objectivists” Anthology. In his essay on the writing of Charles Reznikoff, Zukofsky attempted to define two criteria that were crucial to his understanding of poetic composition: sincerity and objectification. According to Zukofsky, sincerity is present when “[w]riting occurs which is the detail, not mirage, of seeing, of thinking with the things as they exist, and of directing them along a line of melody. Shapes suggest themselves, and the mind senses and receives awareness.”¹⁴”Sincerity and Objectification: With Special Reference to the Work of Charles Reznikoff,” 273. Later in the essay, Zukofsky described Reznikoff’s narrative verse as “perhaps the most neglected contribution to writing in America in the last ten years” because of the degree to which “preoccupation with the accuracy of detail in writing—which is sincerity—is evident” in his work.¹⁵280.

If sincerity was, for Zukofsky, effective poetry’s least common denominator,¹⁶”One speaks of sincerity as of that ability necessary for existence if one is a writer” (283).[ref] objectification was its ultimate goal, what set a well-made poem apart from mere verse.[ref]”Properly no verse should be called a poem if it does not convey the totality of perfect rest” (276). Zukofsky defined objectification as both the result of careful formal shaping and in terms of its effect on its reader. Regarding the former, he described objectification as “the arrangement, into one apprehended unit, of minor units of sincerity—in other words, the resolving of words and their ideation into structure” and as to the latter, he suggested that writing which has achieved objectification “is an object or affects the mind as such” and must “convey the totality of perfect rest.”¹⁷274, 276. Italics added. For Zukofsky, the poem possessing objectification was one that had attained “rested totality,” “resolv[ing] into a structure … to which the mind does not wish to add” such that the “the apprehension [is] satisfied completely as to the appearance of the art form as an object.¹⁸273, 276, 274. This, he noted, was far more difficult to accomplish: “At any time, objectification in writing is rare. The poems or the prose structures of a generation are few … In contemporary writing the poems of Ezra Pound alone possess objectification to a most constant degree; his objects are musical shapes.”¹⁹276. Zukofsky also cited a handful of other examples of objectification in recent work by Williams, Marianne Moore, Cummings, McAlmon and a single poem by T. S. Eliot, while noting that even in Reznikoff, the exemplar he selected as the occasion for his essay, “the degree of objectification … is small” (278). In responding to criticism of his editorial selections, Zukofsky would agree that much of the work he had presented exemplified sincerity rather than objectification, and indeed it was the notion of sincerity rather than objectification that later became something of a talisman for others in the group.

Pressed to explain these terms more than 35 years later by L.S. Dembo, Zukofsky offered this concise clarification: “Sincerity is the care for the detail. Before the legs of the table are made, you can see a nice top or a nice grain in the wood, its potential, anyway, to be the complete table. Objectification is the structure. I like to think of it as rest, but you can call it movement.”²⁰”Louis Zukofsky,” 209. This emphasis on structure and achieving poetic form was shared by others in the group as a particular aim, Williams in particular. In his review of An “Objectivists” Anthology, Williams claimed the poems Zukofsky selected to make up the anthology

are successfully displayed to hold an objective view of poetry which, in a certain way, clarifies it, showing it to be not a seductive arrangement of scenes, sounds and colors so much as a construction each part of which has a direct bearing on its meaning as a whole, an objectification of significant particulars.²¹Something to Say, 46.

In addition to their concern with “the accuracy of detail in writing” (i.e. sincerity) and the careful construction of poetic form (“objectification”), the “Objectivists” shared other basic poetic sympathies. While it is too simple to argue, as some have done, that the “Objectivists” were merely purifiers and renewers of Imagiste principles, each of the “Objectivist” writers was familiar with Pound’s “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste” and F.S. Flint’s “Imagisme,” published in the March 1913 issue of Poetry magazine, and wrote in general agreement with the basic principles articulated therein.²²Pound and Flint’s essays can be read online at the Poetry Foundation’s website here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=58900 and here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=58898. Reznikoff’s assertion that “[w]e picked the name “Objectivist” because we had all read Poetry of Chicago and we agreed completely with all that Pound was saying,” may be an exaggeration, but not by much.²³”Charles Reznikoff,” Contemporary Literature 11:2 (Spring 1969), 196. As I document elsewhere, it was more or less true that Pound was an important, though largely invisible junction through which the group organized itself.²⁴Pound’s role in the formation of the “Objectivist” core is discussed at greater length in both “The Lives” and “The Work” sections of this site. Both “sincerity” and “objectification,” the crucial critical terms Zukofsky used in the essay which accompanied the “Objectivists” poetry in Poetry magazine, had their roots in a Poundian lexicon.²⁵C.f. Pound’s “I believe in technique as the test of a man’s sincerity” in “A Retrospect (Credo),” first published in 1918 (Pavannes and Divisions, 103) and Zukofsky’s assertion in his “Sincerity and Objectification” essay that it was Pound’s poems which “possess objectification to a most constant degree.” Pound’s fellow Imagiste William Carlos Williams may also have contributed to Zukofsky’s phrasing, as he had advised him in a July 1928 letter: “Poems are inventions richer in thought as image. Your early poems, even when the thought has enough force or freshness, have not been objectivized in new or fresh observations.”²⁶The Correspondence of William Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky, 11.

Consider also F.S. Flint on the Imagistes:

They had not published a manifesto. They were not a revolutionary school; their only endeavor was to write in accordance with the best tradition, as they found it in the best writers of all time,—in Sappho, Catullus, Villon. … They had only a few rules, drawn up for their satisfaction only … They were: 1. Direct treatment of the “thing,” whether subjective or objective. 2. To use absolutely no word that did not contribute to the presentation. 3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome.²⁷”Imagisme,” Poetry 1:6 (March 1913), 199.

Taken alone, it’s possible to read this description of the Imagistes as fully applicable to Zukofsky’s “Objectivists” as well, and their shared respect for individual particulars and general satisfaction with basic Imagiste principles may help explain the absence of a distinctly “Objectivist” manifesto. We might also see a precedent for Zukofsky’s vigilance against efforts to recast the group he had presented as a programmed movement in Pound’s earlier abandonment of “Des Imagistes” when the -istes became an -ism, grumbling to all that would listen that Amy Lowell’s intrusive meddling had produced a bastardized Amygism.

Each of these Imagiste “rules” had an analogue or extension in “Objectivist” praxis. The “Objectivist” distrust of abstraction has already been mentioned, and they accompanied their commitment to “direct treatment” of things in their poetry with strong emphases on materiality, embodiment, and sense impressions. This tendency is expressed most succinctly perhaps in these lines from “The Word,” Bunting’s contribution to the “Objectivists” issue of Poetry: “thought’s intricate polyphonic / score dovetails with the tread / sensuous things / keep in our consciousness. // Celebrate man’s craft / and the word spoken in shapeless night, the / sharp tool paring away / waste and the forms/ cut out of mystery!”²⁸260. and Niedecker’s short poem “LZ’s”: ““As you know mind / aint what attracts me / nor the wingspread / of Renaissance man / but what was sensed / by them guys / and their minds still carry / the sensing”²⁹Collected Works, 199. Similarly, Zukofsky would later claim that the theme of Bottom, his major work of criticism, was that “Shakespeare’s text throughout favors the clear physical eye against the erring brain, and that this theme has historical implications.”³⁰”Bottom, A Weaver,” in Prepositions, 167. Williams’ July 1928 letter to Zukofsky which had warned him that his early poems had not been “objectified in new or fresh observations” had also included his assertion that “Eyes have always stood first in the poet’s equipment. If you are mostly ear—a newer rhythm must come in strongly than has been the case so far. Yet I am willing to grant—to listen” (The Correspondence of William Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky, 11).

The Imagiste precept of using no word that does not contribute to the presentation was also integral to “Objectivist” practice. Pound famously cited Bunting as the person who brought the formula dichten = condensare (to write is to condense) to his attention after having discovered it in a German-Italian dictionary, and Zukofsky wrote in his A Test of Poetry that “condensation is more than half of composition” and asserted that “Good poetry is the barest —  most essentially complete — form of presenting a subject; good poetry does not linger to embroider words around a subject.”³¹81, 89. Lorine Niedecker’s “Poet’s Work” provides both a summation and excellent exemplification of the principle: “Grandfather / advised me: Learn a trade // I learned / to sit at desk / and condense // No layoff / from this / condensery.”³²Collected Works, 188. Perhaps my favorite demonstration of this ruthlessness towards words comes from an elegy for George Oppen written by the poet Charles Tomlinson, in which Oppen is reported to have told his sister June Degnan Oppen: “I don’t know / if you have anything to say / but let’s take out all the adjectives / and we’ll find out.”³³”In Memory of George Oppen,” Selected Poems, 199.

The terms Pound coined to describe the three “kinds of poetry” in “How to Read”: phanopoeia, melopoeia, and logopoeia, also figured in important ways in “Objectivist” poetics.³⁴Pound defined phanopoeia as “a casting of images upon the visual imagination” or “imagism”; melopoeia as the emotional charging of words “over and above their plain meaning, with some musical property, which directs the bearing or trend of that meaning” and logopoeia as “the dance of the intellect among words,” which Pound called “the latest come, and perhaps most tricky and undependable mode” (The Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, 25). They be seen most clearly as influences on Zukofsky’s own tripartite distinction between solid (sight), liquid (sound), and gas (intellection) states in poetry: “There are three states of existence: one is solid, another is liquid, and the other is gas. … It’s the same with the materials of poetry, you make images—that’s pretty solid—music, it’s liquid; ultimately if something vaporizes, that’s the intellect.”³⁵”About the Gas Age (September 23, 1970)” in Prepositions, 169. Zukofsky would also tell Dembo in 1968: “I’d say the business of writing is to see as much as you can, to hear as much as you can, and if you think at all to think without clutter; then as you put the things together, try to be concise.”³⁶”Louis Zukofsky,” 209.

As for their practices regarding rhythm and prosody, dozens of examples regarding the “Objectivists” interest in the musical properties of words could be provided, with the best known probably Zukofsky’s oft-quoted lines from “A“-12: “I’ll tell you. / About my poetics— / music / speech / An integral / Lower limit speech / Upper limit music.”³⁷A, 138. In a university lecture he gave in 1970, Bunting gave his own gloss on the relationship between poetry, music, and dance, suggesting their common roots in human embodiment:

Our bodies make their own music whenever we move …  the lightest tread is still an audible rhythmical sound. … That is how music is born. The first step is to use a drum to reinforce the sound of the feet stamping, the arms and the breasts flapping. Or perhaps the first is the more or less inarticulate grunts and skellocks that the vigour of the dance forces from your lungs: which must be the first murmurings of poetry. So poetry and music are twins, born of the primitive dance, and so twinnishly alike that they can never be entirely separated. … [P]oetry is to be heard, to be read aloud or sung.³⁸”The Use of Poetry,” Writing 12 (1985).

In a 1955 letter, Williams gave his own view on the importance of sense perception, the body, and the relations between prosody and dance:

The first thing you learn when you begin to learn anything about this earth is that you are eternally barred save for the report of your senses from knowing anything about it. Measure serves for us as the key: we can measure between objects, therefore, we know that they exist. Poetry began with measure, it began with the dance whose divisions we have all but forgotten are still known as measures.³⁹The Selected Letters of William Carlos Williams, 331.

Observe also the importance of music in Zukofsky’s definition of in “Sincerity and Objectification” essay as writing “thinking with the things as they exist, and of directing them along a line of melody. Shapes suggest themselves, and the mind senses and receives awareness.”⁴⁰Poetry 37.5 (February 1931), 273.

The poetry of the “Objectivists” could also be characterized by its fidelity to the reality and integrity of external objects and its suspicion of, if not downright hostility to, certain kinds of imaginative or metaphoric transformation.⁴¹Zukofsky told Dembo in 1968: “I’m not for metaphor, unless, as Aristotle says, you bring together unlikes that have never existed before” (211). Notice how the active agent in Zukofsky’s description of sincere writing is the external object; it is ‘shapes’ which suggest, and the poet who ‘receives awareness.’ Sensible objects are elevated and the poetic imagination demoted, if not overtly dismissed. The “Objectivists” were anti-symbolist, anti-surrealist, and even, in some ways, anti-aesthetic, even anti-art. This was precisely the claim that Wallace Stevens made in his preface to Williams’ Collected Poems 1921-1931, calling attention to what he saw as Williams’ “antipoetic” impulses.⁴²Stevens used the phrase eight times in three pages, and his insinuation that Williams’ impulses were romantic and sentimental was not well-received by Williams. In a 1970 interview, Oppen would even describe himself as “quite strongly anti-art” (Speaking with George Oppen, 44) Framed differently, “Objectivist” poetry could be said to be rooted in and originate from the external world, and not from the poet’s imagination. In the 1960s, George Oppen would repeatedly emphasize this idea, writing in “World, World”: “The self is no mystery, the mystery is / That there is something for us to stand on,” and claiming in “The Mind’s Own Place,” his only significant work of prose criticism, that

It is possible to find a metaphor for anything, an analogue: but the image is encountered, not found; it is an account of the poet’s perception, of the act of perception; it is a test of sincerity, a test of conviction, the rare poetic quality of truthfulness. They meant to replace by the data of experience the accepted poetry of their time, a display by the poets of right thinking and right sentiment, a dreary waste of lies. That data was and is the core of what “modernism” restored to poetry, the sense of the poet’s self among things. So much depends upon the red wheelbarrow. The distinction between a poem that shows confidence in itself and in its materials, and on the other hand a performance, a speech by the poet is the distinction between poetry and histrionics. It is a part of the function of poetry to serve as a test of truth. It is possible to say anything in abstract prose, but a great many things one believes or would like to believe or thinks he believes will not substantiate themselves in the concrete materials of the poem.⁴³Selected Prose, Daybooks and Papers, 31-32.

What Oppen describes as “the sense of the poet’s self among things” gets us close to the influential distinction made in the 1970s by Charles Altieri between two oppositional positions (which he termed “symbolist” and “immanentist”) regarding questions of priority in the tangle of relations between human imagination, poetic creation, and the ‘bare fact’ of the non-human world.⁴⁴Altieri suggested that “[m]odernist poetry and poetics are informed almost entirely by the symbolist tradition,” which held that the world “can be satisfactorily explained without analogues from man’s experience of his own being in the world,” and followed Coleridge in stressing the poet’s creative power over nature: “For [Coleridge] the creative imagination is the principle of form responsible for generating the value of the particulars in a poem; complexity and fusion are his primary aesthetic values; organic unity is a creation of the poet … not a fact of prior experience; and poetry is in no way imitative, rather it is “secondary creation” (Kant’s term) and thus takes its purposiveness from an act of mind.” The counter-position, which Altieri called “immanentist,” is one in which the poet “imagines the world beyond his self to complement and extend the experience he has of his own body and immediate surroundings,” and is linked to “early Wordsworth’s sense that the subject is created by means of its participation in the object.” In Altieri’s view, the “immanentist” position “stresses the power of nature to create and sustain value,” and insists on “the priority of subject matter or content to form, the call for simplicity of style and a language theory insisting that the world need not be distorted by the words which express it, the precept of looking steadily at one’s subject, and … the opposition between various convention-bound ways of viewing the world and fresh ones which allow its value to manifest itself.” These quotations are taken from “From Symbolist Thought to Immanence: The Ground of Postmodern Poetics,” an article Altieri published in the Spring 1973 issue of boundary2. Later in the decade, he would develop this argument more fully in a Chicago Review article entitled “The Objectivist Tradition” and his book Enlarging the Temple: New Directions in American Poetry in the 1960s, which used a revised version of the boundary2 article as its introduction. Altieri’s original intention was to establish a shibboleth for making distinctions between modernist and post-modern poetries, as he argued that modernist poetics were oriented almost exclusively to the symbolist pole, but that manifestations of immanence “are, in fact, the ground of postmodern poetics.” The only significant exception to the modernist preference for symbolist poetics, in Altieri’s view, were the “Objectivists,” and he used this observation to explain their critical neglect by their contemporaries and their belated recovery in the 1960s and 1970s.

Distrust of metaphor and antagonism to symbolism among the “Objectivists” went much further than Pound’s “the natural object is always the adequate symbol.” From their poetry, consider Williams’ oft-quoted “Say it, no ideas but in things” and its echoes of the foundational principle of empiricism, nihil in intellectu nisi prius in sensu (nothing in the intellect unless first in the senses) or Niedecker’s brisk 1938 poem: “A monster owl / out on the fence / flew away. What / is it the sign / of? The sign of / an owl,”⁴⁵Williams’ line was first printed in 1927 in “Paterson” and recurred frequently as the poem lengthened and became a multi-volume long poem. Niedecker’s poem can be found in her Collected Works, 113-114. Their anti-symbolism can also be found in early “Objectivist” critical prose; in addition to his “Sincerity and Objectification” and “Program: ‘Objectivists’ 1931,” the February 1931 issue of Poetry also included Zukofsky’s own translation of a short essay by his friend René Taupin in which Taupin traces the poet André Salmon’s attempts to break from a “dreamy” and “sentimental” Symbolism and its “betrayal of words and emotions.”⁴⁶”Three Poems by André Salmon,” Poetry 37.5 (February 1931), 290. According to Taupin and Zukofsky, Salmon tried “to save his art from its anemia” through the production of a “nominalistic poetry” in which could be found the “synthesis of real detail, similar to the art of the primitives; and not abstract or decomposed detail, like the impressionists.”⁴⁷Ibid. Salmon’s was a poetry, Taupin and Zukofsky claimed, which sought for “the real” to “strike the poet directly,” offering a glimpse of writing that was “based on choice, on the imagination which apparently does not create but discovers, and gives the accomplished fact its maximum of the real: the esthetic of the reporter and the cinematographer,” and which used for its language “not metaphors, but the most immediate projections of the real which does not stop being real, even taking on … plastic, decorative and emotive value.”⁴⁸Ibid, 290, 293. The essay would also claim, in phrasing which echoed some of William Carlos Williams’ long-standing calls, that “the most direct contact is obligatory, more striking than any metaphor tainted with impure interpretation,” that “the event” should “be left to its integrality, to the maximum of the wonderful,” and that if the integral event was properly respected in poetry, the result would be “the perfect form … not as it is cooked by the imperfect of predatory or sentimental poet.”⁴⁹Ibid, 291-292. In 1934, Bunting wrote to Zukofsky of his belief that “half the evils in the world come from verbalism, i.e. imagining that abstract words have anything more than a grammatical meaning or function. Adjectives, numbers, symbols like the word God, eat away all sense of reality and land us in every kind of social and economic mess, when people begin to think they correspond to anything genuine.”⁵⁰Quoted in Quartermain, Basil Bunting: Poet of the North, 14-15).

This hostility towards abstraction and interest in a “nominalistic poetry” opened the “Objectivists” up to charges of naive barbarism, unsophistication, and brute sensualism,⁵¹See Yvor Winters’ disputes with Zukofsky and Bunting in Hound & Horn, as well as Morris Schappes’ highly critical review of An “Objectivists” Anthology in the March 1933 issue of Poetry: “Nominalism in the psychology of aesthetics is just as inadequate as nominalism in philosophy. There is no artistic communication of particulars only. … Objectivists, as exemplified in this anthology, lack the power, the intelligence, to organize their poems.” Schappes also attacked Zukofsky’s “A” as having “no coherence, no organization, no direction” and suggested that “Objectivism is … a nominalistic denial of art, of value. Because he has been reduced, in his social status, to Nothing, he thinks All is Nothing.” (340-342) but their continued interest in complex formal patterning and the musical properties of language also estranged them from the radical left. They were consummate outsiders whose “style of detachment,” in Eric Homberger’s phrasing, estranged them “from their Jewishness (Reznikoff is an exception) … [and] kept them spectators on the margins of the Communist party.”⁵²”Communists and Objectivists,” in The Objectivist Nexus, 107. Too common (and, it must be said, too Jewish and immigranty) for the WASPy Harvard tastemakers who ran The Criterion and its American imitator The Hound & Horn, they were also too artsy and “detached” (i.e. not didactic enough) for Mike Gold and the would-be proletariat-poets who ran The New Masses. In the early 1930s, Morris Schappes and Herman Spector would attack “Objectivist” theory on ideological grounds as being insufficiently committed to capitalist critique and revolutionary politics.⁵³In Schappes’ review, published in the March 1933 issue of Poetry, he claimed that “at a certain stage in the decay of a class, its artists turn against it in furious vanity” and proceeded to propose his own “intelligent alternative” to the “rootless esotericism” and childish nihilism of the “deracinated bourgeois poet,” namely, “strid[ing] beyond these premises of the bourgeoisie … to ally oneself with the revolutionary proletariat” (343). Spector’s review, published in the Summer 1934 issue of radical journal Dynamo, similarly criticized Reznikoff for displaying “the limited world-view of a ‘detached’ bystander … a person whose flashes of perception for the immediate esthetics of the contemporary scene are no so co-ordinated in any way with a dialectical comprehension of the life-process. … His failure is not the failure of talent or method, which he labors ceaselessly to perfect. It is the failure of the Objectivist school of poets to which he still belongs. More precisely, it is the failure of the bystander to comprehend the world. … The fatal defect of the Objectivist theory is that it identifies life with capitalism, and so assumes that the world is merely a wasteland. The logical consequence is a fruitless negativism. … [Reznikoff] must soon realize that history permit him the alternative: either to succumb to the paralysis of reaction, or else to take that great step forward which is the way of revolution. Impartiality is a myth which defeatists take with them into oblivion. The creative man makes a conscious choice” (Bastard in the Ragged Suit, 104-105). Writing in what Samuel Putnam described as “an era of violent partisanship,” there was small room in poetry for Taupin and Zukofsky’s “esthetic of the reporter and the cinematographer,” particularly if it tried to concern itself with “thinking with the things as they exist, and of directing them along a line of melody” such that they approached “a state of music wherein the ideas present themselves sensuously and intelligently and are of no predatory intention.”⁵⁴The Putnam quotation occurs in Paris Was Our Mistress, 220. The Zukofsky quotations are from “Sincerity and Objectification” and the preface to An “Objectivists” Anthology, respectively. As poets, the group’s shared interest in “sincerity” (used as a shorthand for accurate perception, care for particulars, and the integrity of objects, poetic or otherwise) did not lend itself to ideological writing and the propagandistic aims articulated by the leftist movements that many in the group were drawn to. In 1959, as George Oppen was making his way back into poetry after his long abstention, he wrote his sister June:

Maybe I admire myself more however for knowing what is one thing and what is the other and what are the levels of truth —that is to say, for simply not attempting to write communist verse. That is, to any statement already determined before the verse. Poetry has to be protean; the meaning must begin there. With the perception. … A poem has got to be written into the future. I don’t mean something about the admiration of posterity (from where I sit, posterity looks like a bunch of damn kids) but simply that it’s something that is not the past.

Have to write one’s perceptions, not argue one’s beliefs. And be overwhelmingly happy if they turn out not to be altogether unconscionable.⁵⁵The Selected Letters of George Oppen, 22.

In addition to their shared aesthetic and poetic predilections, there is another sense in which we are justified in considering the “Objectivists” as a group. The individual writers who constellated and agglomerated as “Objectivists” did so not simply because they agreed about what poetry was and how it should be written (unsurprisingly, they didn’t always).⁵⁶For one example, see Basil Bunting’s “Open Letter to Louis Zukofsky,” published in the Rapallo newspaper Il Mare on October 1, 1932 and reprinted in Basil Bunting: Man and Poet, 240-241. Rather, the group’s raison d’etre as “Objectivists” was more pragmatic than it was aesthetic; put plainly, they came together as a group because they could not find publishers willing to reliably print their work and generally lacked the capital needed to do so alone. The Reznikoff-authored corporate statement printed on the dust jackets of The Objectivist Press’ few publications illustrates this well, as does Reznikoff’s later recollection that

I hate to take any aura from our talks as I remember them, if they have any to begin with, but we talked about something quite practical. We couldn’t get our poetry accepted by regular publishers, so we thought it would be nice if we organized our own publishing firm, with each of us paying for the printing of his own book.⁵⁷”Charles Reznikoff,” Contemporary Literature 11:2 (Spring 1969), 196.

Outside of the slippery questions of aesthetic unanimity or similarity in style or poetics, this site gathers and presents incontrovertible evidence that Zukofsky and others of the writers featured here constituted a group by virtue of their having engaged in a series of collaborative publishing ventures in the late 1920s and early 1930s chiefly concerned with circulating their own writing. Furthermore, the core “Objectivists” treated here perpetuated this group identification by continuing to publish, read, and review each other’s work with special interest until the end of their lives.

I have taken such pains to differentiate between objectivism as an aesthetic or poetic movement and the “Objectivists” as a network of sympathetic writers concerned chiefly with publication because so much of the discourse around objectivism is shot through with misconceptions or distortions and hampered by incomplete, anachronistic, or just plain false information. While this is true to some extent for every provisional literary historical grouping, there are particular reasons why producing an accurate historical account of the “Objectivists” has been especially elusive.

First, one major consequence of the conditions which precipitated the group’s formation is that it is hard to find their early poetry and critical opinions. Even during the group’s brief 1930s zenith, the print record of the “Objectivists” is far scanter than they would have wished; to establish this point, one simply needs to compare the group’s various lists of planned or proposed publications with what they actually managed to publish. Furthermore, when various of the “Objectivists” did succeed in publishing their work, it was typically in ephemeral little magazines with modest circulations or in short-lived publishing schemes, the output of which was difficult even for highly interested readers to locate. Zukofsky’s editorial note near the conclusion of An “Objectivists” Anthology plainly admits as much: “The present Anthology presents,” he wrote, “work never before published, or work which has appeared in limited editions now inaccessible, or in small magazines now defunct.”⁵⁸209. The documentary record of proto and early “Objectivist” publications, both aspirational and actual, receives greater attention in “The Work” section of this site.

Second, the group’s access to publication did not much improve, even as these poets developed and matured. Frankly, when considering the invention of “Objectivists” as a publication or promotional strategy, the group was largely a failure. As early as September 1932, Zukofsky was lamenting privately:

My ‘projects’ — or maybe they’re not mine — don’t go. To [Publishers] has had to postpone publishing indefinitely. With postponement goes my salary. I don’t suppose you know of a job for me, but if you hear —

I sent out about 30 “Objectivists” Anthology for review, and not a murmur, not even a cardiac murmur, in reply, or announcement or anything.⁵⁹Letter to Morton Zabel, September 12, 1932, Lilly Library Special Collections, University of Indiana.

Writing in 1951 autobiography, William Carlos Williams would give a similarly frank assessment of the group from that particular historical vantage point:

The poem being an object (like a symphony or cubist painting) it must be the purpose of the poet to make of his words a new form: to invent, that is, an object consonant with his day. This was what we wished to imply by Objectivism, an antidote, in a sense, to the bare image haphazardly presented in loose verse.

Oppen supplied the money, as much as any of us. We had some small success, but few followers. … It all went with the newer appreciation, the matter of paint upon canvas as being of more importance than the literal appearance of the image depicted. Nothing much happened in the end.⁶⁰The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams, 265.

Within ten years of their first associations in the late 1920s, many of the “Objectivists” had abandoned poetry altogether, a consequence of shifting political convictions and public indifference or hostility to their work. Except for Williams, who had already established his own reputation and found a publisher for his work in James Laughlin’s New Directions, even those who continued grinding away did so largely in oblivion. In 1935, shortly after the Objectivist Press had collapsed, Zukofsky wrote to Ezra Pound to make a final plea for assistance in publishing his own manuscript of short poems, which he had completed some five years previous:

You can, if it won’t hurt your own name, try and get me published with Faber & Faber. Serly off to Europe with my final arrangement and additions to 55 Poems—a most commendable typescript for you to look at. Time fucks it, and if I keep my MSS. in my drawer or my drawers, I might as well shut up altogether.⁶¹Pound/Zukofsky, 160.

Pound’s cruel reply made it abundantly clear that he was unable or unwilling to help:

I am getting an english opinyun on yr/ damn poems/ but I know what it will be/ and damn it I told you so, when you were here.

If you are too god damn dumb to read what is being printed/ and insist on sticking in 1927. . thass thaaat. … The next anthology will be econ/ conscious and L/Z won’t be in it. … I can’t even advise N[ew]/ E[nglish]/ W[eekly]/ to print you. … I think it wd/ be BAD EDITING to print you in England. Be careful or you’ll fall back into racial characteristics, and cease to be L/Z at all.

yaaaas, “every man gets more like his father as he gets older.”

Most americans miss the boat/ but it is more irritatin’ to see ’em catch it; and then step off … I can’t hold the boat FOR you.⁶²Pound/Zukofsky, 162-163.

In a 1939 letter to Amy Bonner, the eastern business representative of Poetry magazine, Zukofsky informed her of his ongoing work on “the ninth movement of my long poem ‘A’, which was started in 1928, and on a new volume of short verse to be subtitled ‘Anew,'” and mentioned, with no little pathos, that he also had several “unpublished volumes on hand: 55 Poems (collected work 1923-1934), various prose including a long essay on Henry Adams, “Arise, Arise”, a play in 9 scenes, A Workers Anthology (a collection of verse from Ovid to Apollinaire), A Test of Poetry.”⁶³The Amy Bonner Papers: 1920-1951, The University of Chicago Special Collections, Box 1, Folder 21. Zukofsky’s 55 Poems would not appear in print until 1941, more than dozen years after his “Poem beginning ‘The'” had appeared in Pound’s The Exile. Despite the volume of finished material he had on hand, publication remained difficult for Zukofsky for some time; he was only able to reduce his backlog by two in the remainder of the decade, publishing Anew, a collection of short poems, in 1946, and self-publishing his instructional poetry reader A Test of Poetry in 1948.

Similar difficulties faced each of the other core “Objectivists” who lacked the capital needed to self-publish: between 1932 and 1940, Oppen, Williams, and Reznikoff had the means to finance the publication of their own work, and did so; Zukofsky, Rakosi, Bunting, and Niedecker did not, and so there were no books published by any of these authors during these years.⁶⁴The interested reader can find more detailed publication histories for each of the core “Objectivists” on the child pages of “The Work” section of this site. While Bunting self-published his first collection, Redimiculum Matellarum, from Milan in 1930, an unscrupulous lawyer defrauded his widowed mother, absconding with nearly all of the family’s money in May 1933. Unable to find any publisher in Europe or the United States willing to print his 1935 collection Caveat Emptor, Bunting’s next book of poems was not published until 1950, when his Poems 1950 was published in Galveston, Texas by the obscure Gleaners Press. Rakosi had planned for a book of his poems to be published by Rexroth’s RMR Press as early as 1931, but this publishing scheme never materialized; Rakosi’s first book did not appear until 1941, when James Laughlin made his Selected Poems a New Directions book of the month selection, and his next was Amulet, published in 1967. Niedecker’s first book, New Goose, was not published until 1946, and her earlier, surrealist-inflected work remained uncollected in book form until more than 30 years after her death, when her Collected Works was published in 2002. After her second book, My Friend Tree, appeared in 1962, the same year running water was installed at her tiny lakeside cabin, Niedecker wrote this moving short lyric on the difficulty of having her work published: “Now in one year / a book published / and plumbing— / took a lifetime / to weep / a deep / trickle”⁶⁵Collected Works, 189.

Publishing difficulties and years of silence contributed to additional problems. By the time that a new generation of poets began to show interest in the “Objectivists” and their early publications, many years had elapsed. Even when interested readers and scholars attempted to “go to the source” by asking various living “Objectivists” about the group’s origins or shared poetic ideas, the answers they received came back after having passed through the distorting filter of human subjectivity. The group certainly had its share of interpersonal disagreements, squabbles, and even feuds throughout the years. George Oppen and Zukofsky even managed to fall out with each other twice: once in the 1930s when Oppen admitted he preferred his own poetry to Zukofsky’s, and again in the early 1960s, after an ill-fated joint-family road trip to Mexico and the failure to reach an agreement with New Directions about publishing Zukofsky’s poetry. New friendships and fissures had developed in the intervening years, and not only did the reconstituted “Objectivist” networks of the 1960s and 1970s take on different contours than that of the 1920s and 1930s, they also influenced how early “Objectivists” histories were constructed.

It’s also true that simple bad timing can explain many of the widely-held inaccuracies about the group. Not only did they have the misfortune of emerging during a period when economic pressures limited their access to print and partisanship prevented a fair reading of their work, but by the time that other poets and scholars began attempting to recover and reconstruct their history (spurred especially by L.S. Dembo’s publication of interviews with four “Objectivists” in Contemporary Literature in the Spring of 1969), the three participants who would have been best able to give an accurate recounting of the group’s origin were unwilling or unable to contribute to the historical record. Williams had suffered several strokes and was in failing health (he would die in March 1963); Pound was disgraced by his wartime actions and about to enter several years of largely silent exile to Italy following his release from a lengthy confinement in St. Elizabeths mental hospital;⁶⁶For more on this period in Pound’s life, see J.J. Wilhelm’s Ezra Pound: The Tragic Years, pp. 336-357, especially. and Zukofsky was generally uninterested in participating in group events with other “Objectivists” (especially George Oppen) and seemed to be increasingly annoyed by and dismissive of questions about their decades-earlier association.

In this vacuum, and without ready access to the archive of primary materials now available, literary historians, scholars, and interested readers turned to other members of the group and began to develop their own working definitions of the “Objectivist” movement, and among the less precise, of “objectivism” (or even “objectism” in Charles Olson’s phrasing).⁶⁷Olson used this term in his influential “Projective Verse” manifesto, published in 1950, writing: “Which gets us to what I promised, the degree to which the projective involves a stance toward reality outside a poem as well as a new stance towards the reality of a poem itself. It is a matter of content, the content of Homer or of Euripides or of Seami as distinct from that which I might call the more “literary” masters. From the moment the projective purpose of the act of verse is recognized, the content does—it will—change. If the beginning and the end is breath, voice in its largest sense, then the material of verse shifts. It has to. It starts with the composer. The dimension of his line itself changes, not to speak of the change in his conceiving, of the matter he will turn to, of the scale in which he imagines that matter’s use. I myself would pose the difference by a physical image. It is no accident that Pound and Williams both were involved variously in a movement which got called “objectivism.” But that word was then used in some sort of a necessary quarrel, I take it, with “subjectivism.” It is now too late to be bothered with the latter. It has excellently done itself to death, even though we are all caught in its dying. What seems to me a more valid formulation for present use is “objectism,” a word to be taken to stand for the kind of relation of man to experience which a poet might state as the necessity of a line or a work to be as wood is, to be as clean as wood is as it issues from the hand of nature, to be as shaped as wood can be when a man has had his hand to it. Objectism is the getting rid of the lyrical interference of the individual as ego, of the “subject” and his soul, that peculiar presumption by which western man has interposed himself between what he is as a creature of nature (with certain instructions to carry out) and those other creations of nature which we may, with no derogation, call objects. For a man is himself an object, whatever he may take to be his advantages, the more likely to recognize himself as such the greater his advantages, particularly at that moment that he achieves an humilitas sufficient to make him of use. It comes to this: the use of a man, by himself and thus by others, lies in how he conceives his relation to nature, that force to which he owes his somewhat small existence. If he sprawl, he shall find little to sing but himself, and shall sing, nature has such paradoxical ways, by way of artificial forms outside himself. But if he stays inside himself, if he is contained within his nature as he is participant in the larger force, he will be able to listen, and his hearing through himself will give him secrets objects share. And by an inverse law his shapes will make their own way. It is in this sense that the projective act, which is the artist’s act in the larger field of objects, leads to dimensions larger than the man. For a man’s problem, the moment he takes speed up in all its fullness, is to give his work his seriousness, a seriousness sufficient to cause the thing he makes to try to take its place alongside the things of nature. This is not easy. Nature works from reverence, even in her destruction (species go down with a crash). But breath is man’s special qualification as animal. Sound is a dimension he has extended. Language is one of his proudest acts. And when a poet rests in these as they are in himself (in his physiology, if you like, but the life in him, for all that) then he, if he chooses to speak from these roots, works in that area where nature has given him size, projective size” (“Projective Verse“). As with any acts of canon formation, anthologizing, and literary-historical movement building, there were simplifications, errors, and partisan exaggerations, though distortions and mythologizing have been exceptionally pronounced in the discussion of and construction of the “Objectivist” legacy.

Zukofsky’s general reticence throughout the 1960s to talk about his private memories regarding the creation of the “Objectivists” was particularly damaging to scholarly efforts to produce an accurate reconstruction of the group and their activities because he was the group’s energetic and editorial center: as noted previously, he solicited and selected all of the work which appeared in the two “Objectivist” publications; he wrote the majority of the poetic and editorial statements connected with the group; he initiated the formation of both To, Publishers and The Objectivist Press; and it was he who had the broadest and deepest connections with nearly every other member of both the core and peripheral “Objectivists.” Without the cooperation of Williams, Pound, or Zukofsky, and with the print record so difficult to reconstruct, scholarly attempts to document the emergence of the “Objectivists” seem in hindsight almost predestined to failure, or at the very least, confusion. The distorting effects of interpersonal differences and the passage of time are especially visible in Dembo’s Contemporary Literature interviews with Zukofsky, Rakosi, Reznikoff, and Oppen. Zukofsky, who had refused Dembo’s invitation to participate in a group reading and discussion with the others, began his interview by clearly expressing his annoyance with any discussion of objectivism as a movement, insisting that the “objectivist, then, is one person, not a group,” and setting off on a dazzling monologue about his own poetics.⁶⁸”Louis Zukofsky,” Contemporary Literature 11:2 (Spring 1969): 205. Rakosi, who had not been in New York for the founding of the Objectivist Press, claimed (mistakenly) that Williams had little to do with “the objectivist movement” and told Dembo that he

doubt[ed] whether it is a movement in the sense in which that word is generally used. The term really originated with Zukofsky, and he pulled it out of a hat. It was not an altogether accurate way of designating the few people assembled in the anthology and also in the “Objectivist” issue of Poetry. But he wanted some kind of name, and he checked out the term with me and, I assume, with some of the other people. The name was all right, but I told him I didn’t think some of the poems in the anthology were “objectivist” or very objective in meaning. He said, “Well, that’s true,” but I’ve forgotten the reasons he gave for sticking to the name. It didn’t matter. … I never took my association with Zukofsky and the others that seriously. After all, I was living in the Middle West, except for a brief period in New York when I was seeing Zukofsky, and I didn’t even know any of the other people.⁶⁹”Carl Rakosi,” Contemporary Literature 11:2 (Spring 1969): 179-180.

Reznikoff and Oppen each expressed their own perspectives on the founding of the group, with Reznikoff emphasizing their agreement with Pound’s poetic principles and their interest in depicting external objects with integrity and emotional restraint and Oppen stressing the poet’s honesty and sincerity and the importance of form, of making “an object of the poem.”⁷⁰”George Oppen,” Contemporary Literature 11:2 (Spring 1969): 160. For Dembo and those who followed him, reconstructing the “Objectivists” and their origins must already have felt like the parable of the blind men and the elephant, with various members giving their own subjective recollections of their shared experiences more than 30 years after the events in question.

All this to say that while we now have had 50 years of interest and scholarship in the “Objectivists” and its various members, too many contemporary accounts of this group and the activities of its various members in the 1920s and 1930s remain murky and factually confused. While each of the difficulties enumerated above plagued even those scholars who had access to the living writers in the group, today’s interested literary archaeologist must work primarily with print records, with the “Objectivist” archive, as it were.

This produces two additional problems. First, the “Objectivists” were a large group; all told, more than 30 poets appeared in the two “Objectivist” publications. As Mark Scroggins has noted, “the notion of the “Objectivists” as posse of four – Zukofsky, Oppen, Reznikoff, and Rakosi (with Williams, Niedecker, and Bunting as occasional outriders) – is largely a retrospective construction of literary history … the term “Objectivist” was originally intended as something quite other than a name for a given half-dozen poets.”⁷¹”The ‘Objectivists’ and Their Publications,” published at http://www.z-site.net/biblio-research/the-objectivists-and-their-publications/. Even after bracketing questions about how to define membership in the group and debates over its primary characteristics, studying a literary network is hard, particularly as linear growth in the number of nodes produces non-linear effects on complexity. Even restricting ourselves to just the smaller set of core “Objectivists” proposed here, this network still comprises seven different writers, each with lengthy and varied publication histories and overlapping relationships to dozens of writers either on the periphery or squarely outside of this group. Think of Whitman’s famous boast that “I am large, I contain multitudes,” only made exponential.

Second, while the historical record is always fragmentary and dispersed, this is especially acute in the case of the “Objectivists.” Even for the affiliated writers for whom a well-organized documentary record has been preserved there remain significant and frustrating gaps. The size and depth of the lacunae are worse still for many of the other “Objectivists,” particularly when it comes to records of and from the 1920s and 1930s. In the case of the Oppens, for instance, their large archival holdings contain almost nothing from their lives before 1950, as they discarded or lost most of the material they had in a hasty relocation to Mexico to avoid political persecution in the United States for their previous Communist affiliations. It does not help that many of these writers were deeply suspicious or critical of biographical and scholarly examination, particularly of their private and personal lives. It was Bunting’s habit to destroy much of the correspondence he received, for example, and Niedecker and Zukofsky destroyed or mutilated much of their personal correspondence, including nearly everything they wrote each other prior to Zukofsky’s marriage to Celia Thaew in 1939. The fragmentariness of the existing archives has been much commented on, particularly by the group’s would-be biographers.

Furthermore, even where archival records related to the group do exist, they are often scattered and distributed, with varying levels of access and permissions. The last decade of my own experience demonstrates the difficulty for a single scholar to find the time and money needed to view all of these geographically disperse and varied collections. I attempt to make this problem easier for future scholars through the “The Materials” section of this site, which describes the various archival collections related to the “Objectivists,” and facilitates or provides online access to relevant material wherever possible. I am especially grateful to the heirs and estates for these writers, each of whom has been enormously helpful and generous to me as I’ve pursued this work over the past several years. Further details can be found in the child pages of the “The Materials” section and in the site’s colophon.

Were I to adopt a single epigraph to encapsulate my intentions for this site, perhaps the most fitting would be George Oppen’s lines from his 1968 collection Of Being Numerous:

Clarity, clarity, surely clarity is the most beautiful thing in the world,
A limited, limiting clarity
I have not and never did any motive of poetry
But to achieve clarity⁷²New Collected Poems, 193.

The project of this site is simultaneously both modest and hugely ambitious—it is simply to document, as accurately as possible, the historical actions and reception of the “Objectivist” poets. Interpretation and argument may follow from this grounding, but my primary aim here has been, to borrow another phrase from Oppen’s long poem, to “tell what happens in a life, what choices present themselves, what the world is for us, what happens in time, what thought is in the course of a life and therefore what art is, and the isolation of the actual.”⁷³From section 27 of “Of Being Numerous,” New Collected Poems, 180.

While I am not immune to the forces that produce the biases and contortions described above, I have also been guided in my work on this site by Reznikoff’s characterization of the Objectivist attitude toward judgment and testimony:

By the term ‘objectivist’ I suppose a writer may be meant who does not write directly about his feelings but about what he sees and hears; who is restricted almost to the testimony of a witness in a court of law; and who expresses his feelings indirectly by the selection of his subject-matter. … Now suppose in a court of law, you are testifying in a negligence case. You cannot get up on the stand and say, “The man was negligent.” That’s a conclusion of fact. What you’d be compelled to say is how the man acted. Did he stop before he crossed the street? Did he look? The judges of whether he is negligent or not are the jury in that case and the judges of what you say as a poet are the readers. That is, there is an analogy between testimony in the courts and the testimony of a poet.⁷⁴“Charles Reznikoff,” Contemporary Literature 11.2 (Spring 1969): 194-195.

In reconstructing the origins of the “Objectivists,” this has meant that I have attempted to practice good historiography by preferring, whenever possible, to use primary documents produced by direct participants or eyewitnesses writing as close in time to the events they describe as I can find. My view is that only by collecting and presenting the extant primary documents, the evidence, the materials, can a plausible group history of the “Objectivists” be written. By providing future scholars with improved access to an accurate primary historical and documentary record, my greatest hope for this site is that it will serve as a resource and a starting place for further inquiry into the lives, work, scholarship and “materials” of these poets.

My own contributions to this work have been licensed with a permissive creative commons license permitting others to freely share and adapt this work provided they give proper attribution. I hereby designate this work as a res publica, a thing made for and dedicated to the public good, or in Pound’s preferred translation, for the public convenience.

Furthermore, as a believer in Linus’ Law: “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow,” I expect that greater public exposure will help improve the accuracy of this site in the long term, as the eyes and interests this site attracts will help me more readily correct errors and misstatements. If you notice errors on the site, have relevant material you’d like to contribute, or have ideas for how this site could be made more useful or accessible, please feel free to add them to the site’s annotation layer (powered by the open-source annotation tool Hypothesis) or share them directly with me at swagstaff@wisc.edu.