“Objectivists” 1927-1934 Section 20 - Critical Reactions Contents

Notes - Section 20 - Critical Reactions

1 Poetry (February 1931), 269.

2 Harriet Monroe, “The Arrogance of Youth,” Poetry, 37, 6 (March 1931), 329-330.

3 Poetry (March 1931), 331.

4 Oppen, The Contemporary Writer, p. 173. See Section 6.

5 Williams, “The New Poetical Economy,” Poetry (July 1934), 223-224; George Oppen: Man and Poet, pp. 267-269.

6 Poetry (March 1931), 331.

7 The New Poetry: An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Verse in English, eds. Harriet Monroe and Alice Corbin Henderson (New York: Macmillan, 1923), “The Master,” p. 419, “Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight: In Springfield, Illinois,” p. 268, “After Apple-Picking” and “My November Guest,” pp. 166, 168, “The Garden,” p. 322, “Evening Waterfall,” p. 446, “Ashes of Life,” p. 339, “Night Clouds,” p. 291, and “Beauty,” p. 599. Williams, Selected Essays, p. 165.

8 Zukofsky, Letter to Zabel, 16 January 1931, Zabel Papers, Department of Special Collections, University of Chicago Library, box III, folder 27.

9 Poetry, 38, 1 (April 1931), 51.

10 Poetry (April 1931), 51-52.

11 Zukofsky, Letter to Monroe, 11 February 1931, Poetry Papers, 1912-1936, Department of Special Collections, University of Chicago Library, box 41, folder 14.

12 Poetry (April 1931), 52.

13 Symposium (January 1931), 66.

14 Poetry (March 1931), 306-307.

15 Poetry (April 1931), 52-53.

16 Zukofsky, Letter to Monroe, 11 February 1931, Poetry Papers, 1912-1936, Department of Special Collections, University of Chicago, box 41, folder 14. See Section 18 for Pound’s description of “A”-7.

17 Poetry (April 1931), 53.

18 Poetry (March 1931), 297-300, 354.

19 Poetry (April 1931), 53.

20 Poetry (April 1931), 55.

21 Poetry (April 1931), 55-56.

22 An “Objectivists” Anthology, pp. 24-25.

23 Poetry (April 1931), 53.

24 Poetry (April 1931), 55.

25 Poetry (April 1931), 56.

26 In “A Retrospect,” Pound wrote, “Re Verse Libre,” that he thought the desire for vers libre is due to the sense of quantity reasserting itself after years of starvation,” and that “progress lies . . . in an attempt to approximate classical quantitative metres.” Quantity is more capable than “the measure of regular accentual verse” of registering the necessary subtleties of the object, the real, the “thing,” whose emotion, as Pound assumed, has priority over the prosody, the means used to present it. He wrote:

I think one should write vers libre only when one ‘must,’ that is to say, only when the ‘thing’ builds up a rhythm more beautiful than that of set meters, or more real, more a part of the emotion of the ‘thing,’ more germane, intimate, interpretive than the measure of regular accentual verse; a rhythm which discontents one with set iambic or set anapaestic.

Eliot has said the thing very well when he said, ‘No vers is libre for the man who wants to do a good job.’

Literary Essays, pp. 12-13.

27 Literary Essays, p. 22.

28 Poetry (April 1931), 53.

29 Poetry (April 1931), 56.

30 Pound, Letter to Monroe, 27 March 1931, Selected Letters, p. 231, No. 247.

31 Poetry (April 1931), 53-54.

32 Poetry (April 1931), 56.

33 Poetry (April 1931), 54.

34 Poetry (April 1931), 56.

35 Poetry (April 1931), 54.

36 Poetry (Apri1 1931), 56.

37 Imaginations, pp. 348-350; Pagany, 1, 1 (Winter 1930), 41-46.

38 Poetry (April 1931), 54-55.

39 Poetry (April 1931), 55-57.

40 Poetry (April 1931), 57.

41 Rexroth, Letter to Monroe, 12 January 1931, Poetry Papers, 1912-1936, Department of Special Collections, University of Chicago Library, box 19, folder l2.

42 Letter received from Kenneth Rexroth, December 1978. Rexroth answered six questions: (1) “no”—he does not consider himself an Objectivist, (2) “yes”—he rejects membership to such “groups” on principle, (3) “no”—he does not wish to be considered a member, (4) “yes”—the comments after Zukofsky’s version of part A a of “Prolegomena to a Theodicy” in An “Objectivists” Anthology indicates an original lack of common understanding, (5) “no”—he neither knew nor corresponded with anyone else affiliated with Zukofsky, and (6) yes, he would like to add: “If you read The Objectivists Anthology, you’ll see that Louis invited everybody who didn’t write sonnets. The Objectivists proper are Zukofsky, Oppen, Rakosi, Reznikoff.”

43 Rexroth, Letter to Monroe, 12 January 1931, Poetry Papers, 1912-1936, Department of Special Collections, University of Chicago Library, box 19, folder 12.

44 Rexroth, Letter to Monroe, 12 January 1931, Poetry Papers, 1912-1936, Department of Special Collections, University of Chicago Library, box 19, folder 12. See Zukofsky, Poetry (February 1931), 269, 276. Zukofsky’s editorial policy was “prompted by the historical method of the Chinese sage who wrote, ‘then for nine reigns there was no literary production,’” and he wrote that “At any time, objectification in writing is rare. The poems or the prose structures of a generation are few.”

45 Rexroth, Letter to Monroe, 12 January 1931, Poetry Papers, 1912-1936, Department of Special Collections, University of Chicago Library, box 19, folder 12. See Poetry (February 1931), 291: “‘At that time Jesus said to his disciples’—magnificent, not only in its cadence, but chiefly because it notes the fact with its date, its temporal element (at once eminently mathematical).”

46 Rexroth, Letter to Monroe, 12 January 1931, Poetry Papers, 1912-1936, Department of Special Collections, University of Chicago Library, box 19, folder 12.

47 Rexroth, Letter to Monroe, 12 January 1931, Poetry Papers, 1912-1936, Department of Special Collections, University of Chicago Library, box 19, folder 12. See Williams, “A New Poetical Economy,” Poetry (July 1934), 221; Section 6.

48 Poetry (April 1931), 58.

49 Pound, “Our Contemporaries and Others,” New Review: An International Notebook for the Arts (Paris), 1, 2 (May-June-July 1931), 150.

50 New Review (May-June-July 1931), 152.

51 Pound, Letter to Monroe, 27 March 1931, Selected Letters, p. 231, No. 247.

52 Pound, Letter to Zukofsky, 24 October 1930, Yale; Section 13.

53 Pound, Letter to Monroe, 27 March 1931, Selected Letters, pp. 231-233, No. 247.

54 Poetry (February 1931), 271. Bunting’s title has been translated as “a Necklace of Chamberpots,” by Philip Norman, Multi: Pasil Bunting from the British Press (Berkeley: Poltroons, An Octoroon Book, 29 April 1976), a pamphlet distributed at Bunting’s 1976 reading in San Francisco.

55 “London or Troy?” is from “Against Memory” and quoted by Zukofsky in Poetry (June 1931), 160, and “Adest” (Latin), meaning witness or attend, is from “Villon”; see below.

56 Literary Essays, pp. 12-13.

57 Poetry, 38, 3 (June 1931), 160.

58 Poetry (June 1931), 161.

59 Poetry (June 1931), 162.

60 Bunting, “Villon,” Poetry, 37, 1 (October 1930), 31-32; Collected Poems (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 6.

61 Poetry (June 1931), 161.

62 Zukofsky, Letter to Monroe, 27 July 1931, Poetry Papers, 1912-1936, Department of Special Collections, University of Chicago Library, box 41, folder 14.

63 Poetry, 38, 5 (August 1931), 289-290.

64 Symposium, pp. 73-75; Prepositions, p. 135; Section 12.

65 Poetry (August 1931), 290.

66 Poetry (August 1931), 290.

67 Selected Prose, p. 375; see Section 8.

68 Poetry (August 1931), 279; see Section 8.

69 Poetry (August 1931), 290.

70 “A”-6, “A”, p. 23.

71 Poetry (August 1931), 290.

72 The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Third Edition, Volume 2, p. 1594.

73 Poetry (August 1931), 290. Kenneth Rexroth wrote of Lowenfels:

The one person who came nearest to fulfilling the program developed in the pages of transition was Walter Lowenfels. But Lowenfels was not a free associationist, a dream poet like the Surrealists. Neither was he a revolutionist of the word inventing his own vocabulary. His poetry follows a method of dissociation and recombination of fairly large syntactic elements midway between The Waste Land and the Cantos, and Apollinaire’s Zone, and his sensibility, the feeling of his poetry, is remarkably like Apollinaire. He was over the heads of his own associates in Paris in those days, as can be seen by reading Henry Miller’s satirical portrait of him “Jabberwohl Kronstadt.” He isn’t really at all difficult to understand now that forty years have made us familiar with the idiom. . . . At the time Lowenfels, who was certainly not a member of any Lost Generation, nevertheless did think of himself as an expatriate—he had come to Paris to stay. As the world economy broke down and Fascism threatened France, he became increasingly politicized and, eventually, out of a sense of duty, returned to America, entered Left politics, and ceased to write verse for many years. He was indicted under the Smith Act as a Communist and started to write again while waiting trial. As time went on he became extremely popular with the the Fifties and Sixties. He is the only person of his background who has managed to bridge the generation gap.

American Poetry in the Twentieth Century, pp. 101-102.

74 Williams, Letter to Pound, 15 March 1933, Selected Letters, p. 139, No. 96.

75 Poetry (August 1931), 290-291.

76 Zukofsky, Letter to Zabel, 3 August 1931, Zabel Papers, Department of Special Collections, University of Chicago Library, box III, folder 27.

77 Zukofsky, Letter to Monroe, 27 July 1931, Poetry Papers, 1912-1936, Department of Special Collections, University of Chicago Library, box 41, folder 14.