Louis Zukofsky Letters (VMF200), 1958-1963 | MSS Manuscripts

Zukofsky, Louis (1904-1978)

Louis Zukofsky (January 23, 1904 – May 12, 1978) was an American poet. He was one of the founders and the primary theorist of the Objectivist group of poets.  Born in New York's Lower East Side, he attended Columbia University where he studied philosophy and English, graduating with a Master's degree in 1924.  Zukofsky began writing poetry at university and joined the college literary society, as well as publishing poems in student magazines like The Morningside (now Columbia Review).

In 1934, Zukofsky got a research job with the Works Projects Administration (WPA), a position he held until 1942, working on a history of American handicrafts. In 1943, Zukofsky left the WPA to work as a substitute public school teacher and a technical writer. In 1947, he took a job as an instructor in the English Department of the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, where he taught until his retirement in 1966.

Ezra Pound was impressed by Zukofsky's Poem beginning "The" and promoted his work, putting him in contact with other like-minded poets, including William Carlos Williams. Zukofsky was one of the founders of the Objectivist group of poets and of To Publishers, later The Objectivist Press, along with Charles Reznikoff and George Oppen. Thanks to Pound's insistence, he was able to edit an Objectivist issue of Poetry, in which he coined the very term and defined the two main characteristics of Objectivist poetry: sincerity and objectification. Despite the attention Objectivism received as a major poetic movement of the 1930s, Zukofsky’s own work never achieved much recognition outside literary circles since his poetry was seen as obscure, too experimental, and dryly intellectual. Zukofsky, along with the other Objectivists, was rediscovered by the Black Mountain and Beat poets in the 1960s and 1970s.

Zukofsky's major work was the long poem "A" - he never referred to it without the quotation marks - which he began in 1927 and was to work on for the rest of his life, albeit with an eight-year hiatus between 1940 and 1948. The poem was divided into 24 sections, reflecting the hours of the day.