Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 ‘Longing for perfection’: history and utopia in Louis Zukofsky
- 2 ‘Atlantis buried outside’: Muriel Rukeyser, myth and war
- 3 Slipping the cog: Charles Olson and Cold War history
- 4 Husky phlegm and spoken lonesomeness: poetry against the Vietnam War
- 5 ‘You can be the music yourself’: Amiri Baraka's attitudes, 1974–80
- 6 Figures of inward: Language poetry and the end of the avant-garde
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
1 - ‘Longing for perfection’: history and utopia in Louis Zukofsky
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2017
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 ‘Longing for perfection’: history and utopia in Louis Zukofsky
- 2 ‘Atlantis buried outside’: Muriel Rukeyser, myth and war
- 3 Slipping the cog: Charles Olson and Cold War history
- 4 Husky phlegm and spoken lonesomeness: poetry against the Vietnam War
- 5 ‘You can be the music yourself’: Amiri Baraka's attitudes, 1974–80
- 6 Figures of inward: Language poetry and the end of the avant-garde
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Critical consensus has long been reached on the trajectory of Louis Zukofsky's literary career. The story of the poet's move from a selfdefeating political verse in the 1930s to a liberating poetics of pure form after the war is well rehearsed. As the world continues to face the deleterious effects of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, it is a good time reconsider the priorities implicit in this narrative, and in doing so the literary history that has been forgotten in its construction. This chapter will chart the development of one of Zukofsky's key preoccupations: the presentation of historical particulars, seen here as a dialectic rooted in tensions between a materialist revolutionary politics on the one hand, and a modernist sense of tradition with Poundian, reactionary aesthetics on the other. In the argument below, Zukofsky's primary value lies in his work's embodiment of conflicts that go to the heart of the relationship between political vanguardism and the particular inheritance of Anglophone modernism. The lessons that Zukofsky offers the contemporary reader are in how his experimental political poetry straddles Anglophone modernism and social realism, whose separate tensions with avant-gardism are brought together to occasion a vanguard poetics in the fullest sense of the word. This chapter suggests that the overcoming of these difficulties in Zukofsky's later career, in large part through the celebrated trope of music, is less a solution to than an elision of the political, a surrender to formalism that we might see as the inevitable outcome of attempts to reconcile modernist ideals of aesthetic order with a radical political impulse to change the world.
Historic and contemporary particulars
Since the first essays on the Objectivist poets by Hugh Kenner and Cid Corman there has been an anxiety among commentators to decant the poets associated with the movement from the revolutionary cultural milieu that gave rise to their unique fusion of modernism and left-wing politics but at the same time made them seem naïve, political and topical.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Crisis and the US Avant-GardePoetry and Real Politics, pp. 16 - 42Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2015