Objectivism (Poetry)

Objectivist poetry was a small, loosely organized American poetry movement of the early 1930s, associated above all with Louis Zukofsky, who edited a 1931 special issue of Poetry magazine under the Objectivist name, and with fellow poets George Oppen, Charles Reznikoff, Carl Rakosi and, at the movement's edges, the older poets Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, who influenced but were not formally members of the group. The Objectivists sought a poetry of clear, unsentimental attention to the object or the historical particular, treating the poem itself as an object made with the same exacting formal care as any crafted thing, in reaction against what they saw as the vagueness of much contemporary verse. Zukofsky's long poem A and Reznikoff's documentary-influenced verse are among the movement's most significant works, and though the group's public activity was brief, Objectivism was rediscovered by later twentieth-century American poets, particularly the Language poets, as an important precursor.