The basic tenets of Objectivist poetics, as defined by Louis Zukofsky, were to treat the poem as an object and to emphasize sincerity, intelligence, and the poet's ability to look clearly at the world.
[1] The core group consisted of the Americans Zukofsky, Williams, Charles Reznikoff, George Oppen and Carl Rakosi, and the British poet Basil Bunting.
A number of other poets were included in early publications under the Objectivist rubric without actually sharing the attitudes and approaches to poetry of this core group.
Another of Zukofsky's literary mentors at this period was Charles Reznikoff, a New York City poet whose early work was also influenced by Imagism.
The final member of the core group, Basil Bunting, was an English poet who came from a Quaker background and who had been imprisoned as a conscientious objector during World War I.
In addition to poems by Rakosi, Zukofsky, Reznikoff, George Oppen, Basil Bunting and William Carlos Williams, Zukofsky included work by a number of poets who would have little or no further association with the group: Howard Weeks, Robert McAlmon, Joyce Hopkins, Norman Macleod, Kenneth Rexroth, S. Theodore Hecht, Harry Roskolenkier, Henry Zolinsky, Whittaker Chambers, Jesse Lowenthal, Emanuel Carnevali (as translator of Arthur Rimbaud), John Wheelwright, Richard Johns and Martha Champion.
In this second essay, Zukofsky expands on the basic tenets of Objectivist poetics, stating that in sincerity "Writing occurs which is the detail, not mirage, of seeing, of thinking with the things as they exist, and of directing them along a line of melody", and that objectification relates to "the appearance of the art form as an object."
The knowledge not of sorrow, you were saying, but of boredom Is — aside from reading speaking smoking — Of what, Maude Blessingbourne it was, wished to know when, having risen, “approached the window as if to see what really was going on”; And saw rain falling, in the distance more slowly, The road clear from her past the window- glass — Of the world, weather-swept, with which one shares the century.
extract from "A"-7 by Louis Zukofsky Another aspect of Objectivist poetics that is not explicitly addressed in these essays is an interest in exploiting the resonances of small, everyday words.
As Zukofsky was to write some time later (in 1946), "a case can be made for the poet giving some of his life to the use of the words the and a: both of which are weighted with as much epos and historical destiny as one man can perhaps resolve.
Monroe was particularly angered by Zukofsky's rejection of Edwin Arlington Robinson, Robert Frost, Edgar Lee Masters, and Edna St. Vincent Millay, all of whom were regular contributors to the magazine.
However, not all reactions were so unfavorable; Niedecker read the issue at her local public library in Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin, and wrote to Zukofsky shortly thereafter, beginning a friendship and frequent literary correspondence that would last until her death 40 years later.
This anthology featured far fewer contributors: Basil Bunting, Mary Butts, Frances Fletcher, Robert McAlmon, George Oppen, Ezra Pound, Carl Rakosi, Kenneth Rexroth, Charles Reznikoff, William Carlos Williams, Louis Zukofsky and Forest Anderson, T. S. Eliot, R. B. N. Warriston and Jerry Reisman.
Reznikoff's Separate Way (1936) was the last publication of The Objectivist Press, not counting Zukofsky's A Test of Poetry (1948), which was published under its imprint twelve years later.
The Oppens returned to New York in 1960, and George went on to publish six books of poetry between 1962 and 1978, by which time he was finding it increasingly difficult to write—he had Alzheimer's disease.
Shortly after turning 21, Rakosi had legally changed his name to Callman Rawley under which name he served as the head of the Minneapolis Jewish Children's and Family Service from 1945 until his retirement in 1968.
As was the case for many of the other Objectivists, a combination of critical neglect and personal circumstances meant that this early publication was followed by a longish period of poetic silence during which she was unable to find a publisher for her work.
Three years later, they brought out Testimony: The United States, 1885–1890: Recitative, the first installment of a long work based on court records covering the period 1855 to 1915.
In the 1970s, Black Sparrow Press started publishing Reznikoff, bringing out the complete Testimony as well as a similar work, Holocaust, based on courtroom accounts of Nazi concentration camps.
As the poem progressed, formal considerations tended to be foregrounded more and more, with Zukofsky applying a wide range of devices and approaches, from the sonnet to aleatory or random composition.
The early critical reception of the Objectivists was generally hostile, particularly in reviews by Morris Schappes and Yvor Winters, as well as Harriet Monroe's already-mentioned unfavorable reaction to the Poetry special issue.
Pound, too, was influenced by the Objectivist sense of form, their focus on everyday vocabulary, and their interests in politics, economics and specifically American subject matter.
The critic Hugh Kenner has argued that these influences helped shape the sections of The Cantos published during the 1930s, writing "Pound was reading them, and they him".
The poets of the Beat Generation, a group of American bohemian writers to emerge at the end of the 1940s that included Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder and Jack Kerouac, owed much to Pound and Williams, and were led, through them, to the Objectivists.
In the 1950s and 1960s, Zukofsky was sought out by younger poets including Paul Blackburn, Jerome Rothenberg, Jonathan Williams, Denise Levertov, Gilbert Sorrentino and Allen Ginsberg.
Zukofsky's formal procedures, especially his interest in aleatory writing, were a key influence on Jackson Mac Low and John Cage, amongst others, and through them on the Language School, an avant garde group of poets who started publishing in the 1970s and who included Bruce Andrews, Charles Bernstein, Ron Silliman, Lyn Hejinian, Bob Perelman, Michael Palmer, Rae Armantrout, Carla Harryman, Barrett Watten, Clark Coolidge, Hannah Weiner, Susan Howe, Tina Darragh and Fanny Howe.
Oppen and Reznikoff influenced subsequent generations of poets, most notably, Theodore Enslin, Harvey Shapiro, Michael Heller, Norman Finkelstein, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, John Taggart, and Armand Schwerner to name a few.
Their poetry continues the Objectivist obsession with language, ethics, and world and often addresses modern, urban, Jewish life, both secular and religious.