Poems, 1923-1941

The Objectivists were a loose-knit group of second-generation Modernist poets who emerged in the 1930s, members of a poetic movement within the broader movement of literary Modernism known as Objectivism. The group consisted primarily of American nationals and was influenced by Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, among other contemporaneous writers. 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. While the name of the movement is the same as that of Ayn Rand's school of philosophy, the two movements are not affiliated. The core group consisted of the Americans Zukofsky, Williams, Charles Reznikoff, George Oppen and Carl Rakosi, and the British poet Basil Bunting.