Louis Zukofsky (January 23, 1904 – May 12, 1978) was an American poet. He was the primary instigator and theorist of the so-called "Objectivist" poets, a short lived collective of poets who after several decades of obscurity would reemerge around 1960 and become a significant influence on subsequent generations of poets in America and abroad.
Life Louis Zukofsky was born in New York City's Lower East Side to Yiddish speaking immigrants from Lithuania, then part of the Russian Empire. His father Pinchos (ca. 1860–1950) immigrated to the United States in 1898, and was followed in 1903 by his wife, Chana (1862–1927), and their three children. Pinchos worked as a pants-presser and night watchman for many decades in New York's garment district. This is the authoritative source on Zukofsky's biographical details.
The only one of his siblings born in the United States, Louis Zukofsky was a precocious student in the local public school system. As a boy he frequented the nearby Yiddish theatres on the Bowery, where he saw classic works by Shakespeare, Ibsen, Strindberg, and Tolstoy performed in Yiddish. Zukofsky began writing poetry at an early age, and his earliest known publications were in the student literary journal of Stuyvesant High School, from which he graduated at age 15. While when young he translated from the modern Yiddish poetry of Yehoash (Solomon Blumgarten), there is no indication he ever considered writing in Yiddish himself.
Beginning shortly before his 16th birthday in January 1920, Zukofsky attended Columbia University's undergraduate men's college and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, where he studied English. Some of his teachers and classmates subsequently emerged as important lodestars of midcentury literature and culture, namely Mark Van Doren (who maintained a lifelong acquaintance with Zukofsky despite lambasting him as a "painfully inarticulate soul" in a 1927 article), John Dewey, John Erskine, Lionel Trilling and Mortimer Adler (who may have enjoined Zukofsky to study the humanities instead of engineering). He joined the Boar's Head Society and published in the Morningside, a student literary journal. Although he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa upon completing nearly all of the undergraduate curriculum in three and a half years, much like Adler, Zukofsky did not receive a Columbia College degree after dropping out of the required physical education course. Nevertheless, he was admitted to the Graduate School, receiving an M.A. in 1924 with a thesis on Henry Adams. He would publish a revised version of this thesis as "Henry Adams: A Criticism in Autobiography" in the journal Pagany, and Adams would remain a significant intellectual influence on Zukofsky's work. One of Zukofsky's closest friends during the 1920s was his Columbia classmate, Whittaker Chambers, and throughout the 1930s he aligned himself with Marxism, although he never joined the Communist Party. Despite his academic success, Zukofsky was not offered an instructorship that may have facilitated the completion of a Ph.D. or an eventual tenure-track academic appointment; according to a retrospective 2002 analysis by Mark Scroggins, "Then as now, writing one's thesis on a recently dead and as yet uncanonized figure (Adams had died only six years before) was not the path to academic preferment [...] [Zukofsky's inability to secure an instructorship] might have been a matter of personality: quiet and withdrawn, Zukofsky no doubt seemed less than promising teaching material. And the unwritten code of anti-Semitism that reigned in the English department--and that would not be broken until Lionel Trilling was hired in 1939--almost certainly told against him. At any rate, Zukofsky's formal schooling ended in 1924, and he would make no attempt to continue to the doctorate."
During the 1930-31 academic year, Zukofsky taught English at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, the only time he lived outside the New York City metropolitan area. In 1934, Zukofsky began work as a researcher with the Works Projects Administration (WPA), and over the course of the rest of the decade he worked on various WPA projects, most notably the Index of American Design, a history of American material culture. In the same year, he met Celia Thaew (1913–1980) and they married in 1939; their only child, Paul Zukofsky (1943–2017), was a child prodigy violinist and went on to become a prominent avant-garde violinist and conductor. During World War II, Zukofsky edited technical manuals at a number of electronics companies working in support of the war effort. In 1947, he took a job as an instructor in the English Department of the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, where he would remain until his retirement at the rank of associate professor in 1965. He subsequently was a visiting professor at the University of Connecticut.
Throughout most of the 1940s and 1950s, the Zukofskys lived in Brooklyn Heights, then from 1964 to 1973 in Manhattan, and finally they retired to the Suffolk County outer suburb of Port Jefferson, New York, where he completed his magnum opus "A" and his last major work, the highly compressed poetic sequence 80 Flowers. Just a few months after completing the latter work and proof-reading the complete "A", Zukofsky died on May 12, 1978. He had been awarded National Endowment for the Arts Grants in 1967 and 1968, the National Institute of Arts and Letters "award for creative work in literature" in 1976, and an honorary doctorate from Bard College in 1977.
Early career
As a student Zukofsky wrote prolifically in imitation of many styles, both traditional and free verse. However, his first distinctive work was the long poem, "Poem beginning 'The,'" composed in 1926 and published by Ezra Pound in his journal The Exile in 1928. Demonstrating a precocious assimilation of modernist styles, this is an autobiographical portrait of the young poet. The poem satirizes the older modernists for their pessimism, particularly T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, examines his cultural identity and the question of assimilation as the son of immigrant Jews, and concludes by asserting his poetic independence from the claims of family and his Jewish heritage, opting instead for a more cosmopolitan poetic identity. Pound remained an important supporter of Zukofsky in the following years, famously dedicating Guide to Kulchur (1938) "To Louis Zukofsky and Basil Bunting strugglers in the desert." Their relationship over the course of the 1930s became severely strained because of Pound's increasingly strident fascism and anti-semitism, yet Zukofsky always maintained the highest regard for Pound's poetic abilities.
"Objectivist" Poets
Pound put Zukofsky in contact with William Carlos Williams, who would remain a major supporter of and influence on the younger poet. Williams found Zukofsky to be a valuable critic and editor of his own work, which he acknowledge by dedicating The Wedge (1944) to L.Z.. Pound persuaded the editor of Poetry magazine, Harriet Monroe, to allow Zukofsky to edit an issue showcasing younger poets, resulting in the famous "Objectivists" issue (Feb. 1931), which included Zukofsky's statement "Sincerity and Objectification." Although all the poets, including Zukofsky, denied any intention of forming a distinct poetic movement, a core group became identified as the Objectivist poets, which included besides Zukofsky, his friends Charles Reznikoff, George Oppen and Carl Rakosi, and Lorine Niedecker as well as Pound's friend and protégé Basil Bunting. Zukofsky edited An "Objectivists" Anthology (1932), published by George Oppen's To, Publishers, and for a brief spell there was the collective The Objectivist Press, but the group attracted only limited attention at the time.
"A"
Zukofsky's major work was the very long poem "A"—he never referred to it without the quotation marks—which he began in 1928 and would work on intermittently for most of the rest of his life, finally completing the poem in 1974. He predetermined that the work would have 24 sections, which he called movements, but both formally and thematically he allowed the poem to develop as the occasion dictated. "A"-1 opens at a performance of Bach's St. Matthew Passion, whose fugal intricacies became one of the formal models for the poem. The first six movements are predominately autobiographical but all directly or indirectly considering the question of the proper form for the poem at hand—"A"-6 ends by posing the question: "With all this material / To what distinction—." The preliminary answer is "A"-7, often taken to be Zukofsky's first distinctly individual poem that looks forward to much that will follow. This movement is a set of seven sonnets which focus on sawhorses marking off an area of a street under repair, which are imaginatively animated, a dynamic image of the poem itself as a construction site simultaneously constructed and deconstructed. In a number of later movements, Zukofsky would similarly adopt strict traditional forms combined with unconventional materials to create highly compacted poems: "A"-9 takes the intricate form of Guido Cavalcanti's canzone, "Donna me prega," using content mostly adapted from Karl Marx's Capital. A related major poem, although outside of "A", is "'Mantis'" which adopts the form of a sestina by Dante to create a political lyric, to which Zukofsky added "An Interpretation" reflecting on the question of poetic form relevant to contemporary concerns. In counterpoint to these highly formal and compacted movements, there are sprawling free-verse movements, notably "A"-8, whose depiction of contemporary world interviews vignettes of the Great Depression with the writings of Marx, Lenin and Henry Adams on American history. Much of Zukofsky's work of the 1930s attempted to bring together modernist formalism with a Leftist political perspective. "A"-10 is a cry of despair in response to the fall of France in June 1940 structured on Bach's Mass in B minor, after which Zukofsky paused work on "A" for some years.
Other early writings
In tandem with "A", Zukofsky continued writing shorter poems throughout his life, although he had difficulties publishing outside of journals during the Depression era. His first collection of shorter poems, 55 Poems, did not appear until 1941, although it represented work completed by the mid-1930, including "Poem beginning 'The'" and "'Mantis.'" Another collection, Anew, came out in 1946. In the mid-1930s he also wrote his only play, Arise, Arise, a political dream play, which however remained unperformed and unpublished until the 1960s. During the same period he wrote a work of experimental prose, Thanks to the Dictionary, improvising with the vocabulary and definitions found in the dictionary. In the early 1940s he attempted more conventional short stories, of which the novella length Ferdinand is the most significant. One of Zukofsky's most eccentric works was Le Style Apollinaire/The Writing of Guillaume Apollinaire (1934), which was ghost written for his friend René Taupin, presenting three approaches to the body of Apollinaire's work in large part through the presentation and arrangement of quotations. Throughout much of the 1930s Zukofsky worked on a poetry textbook, A Test of Poetry, after the manner of Pound's ABC of Reading, primarily juxtaposing sample poems or excerpts with little commentary and asking to student to draw their own conclusions. Although initially this text only saw the light of day when self-published in 1948, it has since been reprinted three times.
Later career