Louis Zukofsky

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Zukofsky, Louis (1904–78), born of Russian immigrant parents on New York's Lower East Side, has come to be recognized as a major poet although his work was not commercially printed in a book until he was in his fifties. His lyric poems, spare, precise, and powerful, were first gathered from little magazines and booklets when he was in his sixties into All the Collected Short Poems, 1923–1958 (1965) and All the Collected Short Poems, 1956–1964 (1966). His works are marked by organic form, sharp observation, and verbal association with the object with which the poem began, and he was considered a leader of the Objectivist school. In 1927 he started his great poem “A,” presenting in diverse forms his experience of art and life, of personal and public events, that began in “A” 1–12 (1959) and “A” 13–21 (1969) and was finally completed with the publication in 832 pages of “A” (1979). His poetic theories and other critical concepts are found in Le Style Apollinaire (Paris, 1934), A Test of Poetry (1948), Prepositions (1967), and The Gas Age (1969). His aesthetic views are also to be found in Bottom: On Shakespeare (2 vols., 1963), whose second part contains his wife Celia's musical setting for Pericles. With her he translated Catullus (1969), and to the poetic personal statements that comprise his Autobiography (1970) she contributed musical settings for his lyrics. He also published works of fiction: It Was (1961), revised as Ferdinand (1968), and Little; for Careenagers (1970), a comic tale of a prodigy violinist from his birth to age 12. These and other works were gathered in Collected Fiction (1990). Zukofsky was a professor of English at various institutions, notably Polytechnic Institute, Brooklyn, and the University of Connecticut.

Zukofsky, Louis (1904–78), American poet, was born in New York. In 1931 with Pound's sponsorship he edited the ‘Objectivists’ issue of Poetry, followed in 1932 by An ‘Objectivists’ Anthology, featuring among others Carl Rakosi, George Oppen, and B. Bunting. Zukofksy's lyrics, collected in the Complete Short Poetry (1991), are vividly textual, often witty, always stylish and lapidary. They are challenging and opaque or else clear as crystal. As with many of his contemporaries, a deep philosophical puzzlement also attaches to his work, making it some of the most intellectually inimitable in the US canon. Written over 45 years in 24 categorical parts, his long poem “A” (1978) shows itself as a compendium of forms and forces, a Modernist and post-modernist epic in which translation, music, drama, and reiteration hustle and contend. Its range of practices and influences dictate ultra-modern readings.