“Objectivists” 1927-1934 Section 5 - Williams and Zukofsky Contents

Notes - Section 5 - Williams and Zukofsky

1 Williams, Letter to Zukofsky, 2 April 1928, Selected Letters, p. 94, No. 66.

2 William James, Psychology: Briefer Course (New York: Macmillan, 1962), p. 26.

3 Carroll C. Pratt, “Wolfgang Kohler: 1887-1967,” in The Task of Gestalt Psychology by Wolfgang Kohler (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969), pp. 25-27.

4 Wolfgang Kohler, The Task of Gestalt Psychology, p. 53.

5 James, Psychology: Briefer Course, pp. 25-29.

6 Zukofsky, “‘Recencies’ in Poetry,” An “Objectivists” Anthology, p. 16.

7 F. S. Flint, “Imagisme,” Poetry, 1, 6 (March 1913), p. 199; Pound, Literary Essays (1968), p. 3.

8 Literary Essays, p. 46.

9 “Affirmations, IV. As for Imagisme,” New Age, 16, 13 (28 January 1915), 349-350; Selected Prose 1909-1965, ed. William Cookson (New York: New Directions, 1975), p. 376.

10 Gaudier-Brzeska, p. 86.

11 “The Mind’s Own Place,” Montemora, 1 (Fall 1975), 133.

12 Gaudier-Brzeska, p. 86.

13 Literary Essays, p. 25.

14 Gaudier-Brzeska, p. 92.

15 Gaudier-Brzeska, pp. 81, 92.

16 Pound, Letter to Williams, 29 November 1912, Yale; quoted by Bock, The Birth of Modernism, p. 138.

17 Literary Essays, p. 3.

18 The preface to Some Imagist Poets: An Anthology (Boston: Houghton and Mifflin, 1915), p. v, opposed to their method of each poet selecting his or her own work for the anthology the arrange- ment “of the former Anthology,” undoubtedly Pound’s Des Imagistes (1914), which is described as “an arbitrary selection by an editor.”

19 Amy Lowell, Letter to M. Andre Fontainas, 6 March 1919, in Amy Lowell: A Chronicle by S. Foster Damon (Boston: Houghton & Mifflin, 1935), p. 169.

20 Williams, The Autobiography, pp. 264-265.

21 “American Poetry 1920-1930,” Symposium (January 1931), 263; Prepositions, p. 138.

22 Zukofsky, Letter to Pound, 12 December 1930, Montemora, 8 (1981), 178.

23 Williams, Letter to Zukofsky, 5 July 1928, Selected Letters, pp. 101-102, No. 73. Williams must refer to poems Zukofsky wrote between 1920 and 1924, presented again to Williams in 1941 in a collection titled First Seasons and signed with the pseudonym “Dunn Wyth.” Copies of this collection are at Yale and Austin.

24 V. I. Ulianov is Lenin’s given name. The poem, written in 1925, was published under its original title with an epigraph from Pilgrim’s Progress in Exile, 4 (Autumn 1928), 84-86, and in the anthology Poetry Out of Wisconsin (New York: Henry Harrison, 1937), pp. 312-313. It next appeared in 55 Poems (1941), and in All: The Collected Short Poems: 1923-1964 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971), pp. 23-24.

25 Williams, Letter to Zukofsky, 18 July 1928, Selected Letters, p. 102, No. 74. The “earlier book of poems” is probably First Seasons; the “long one” is “Poem beginning ‘The.’”

26 Gaudier-Brzeska, p. 92.

27 Gaudier-Brzeska, Gaudier-Brzeska, p. 20; or, in Pound’s words, “One uses form as a musician uses sound. One does not imitate the wood-dove, or at least one does not confine oneself to the imitation of wood-doves, one combines and arranges one’s sound or one’s forms into Bach figures or into arrangements of colour, or into “planes in relation”; Gaudier-Brzeska, p. 125.

28 Selected Letters, pp. 102-103, No. 1a.

29 Williams, “Zukofsky,” “A” 1-12 (Ashland, Mass.: Origin Press, 1959), p. 291.

30 Zukofsky, “Sincerity and Objectification: With Special Reference to the Work of Charles Reznikoff,” Poetry, 37, 5 (February 1931), 279.

31 Poetry (February 1931), 273.

32 Literary Essays, p. 9.

33 Poetry Out of Wisconsin, p. 312.

34 Blast (20 June 1914), 154.

35 Gaudier-Brzeska, p. 86.

36 Blast (20 June 1919), 121-122.

37 Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art (New York: George Wittenborn, 1966), p. 154. Mike Weaver documents the accessibility of Kandinsky’s work in Williams’ circle in William Carlos Williams: The American Background (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1971), pp. 38-39.

38 Mike Weaver, pp. 37-38.

39 Selected Essays, p. 23.

40 Blast (20 June 1914), 119.

41 Weaver, p. 38.

42 Weaver, p. 48.

43 Whitehead, Science and the Modern World: Lowell Lectures, 1925 (New York: Macmillan, 1925), p. 124; hereafter cited as SMW. I am indebted to Robert von Hallberg for bringing this passage to my attention in “Olson, Whitehead and the Objectivists,” Boundary 2, 2, 1 & 2 (Fall 1972/Winter 1974), 85-111.

44 Whitehead, Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect, Barbour-Page Lectures, University of Virginia 1927 (New York: Macmillan, 1927). pp. 11-12.

45 SMW, p. 125.

46 Weaver, p. 48. My interpretation of Weaver is questionable; the year might have been 1926.

47 Gaudier-Brzeska, p. 81. The term “exactitude” is from How to Read, in Literary Essays, p. 22.

48 Weaver, p. 47; Riordan to Williams, 25 June 1926, Buffalo.

49 Weaver, p. 47.

50 Weaver, pp. 50, 49.

51 Kenneth Rextoth makes fun of it, for example, by claiming Williams invented this “prehensile foot” to mystify college audiences. American Poetry in the Twentieth Century, p. 79.

52 Williams, “The Poem as a Field of Action,” Selected Essays, p. Z86.

53 Although Williams did not finish Science and the Modern World until September 1927, Riordan gave it to him in December 1925 (l926?), and Williams’ dictum was first published in the poem “Paterson” in the Dial on February 1927 (cited in Emily Mitchell Wallace, A Bibliography of William Carlos Williams, p. 181).

54 SMW, p. 199.

55 SMW, pp. 279-280.

56 “Paterson,” The Collected Earlier Poems (Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1951), pp. 233-235.

57 Zukofsky, “Program: ‘Objectivists’ 1931,” Poetry (February 1931), 268.