William Carlos Williams, who was the only poet to be published as both an Objectivist and an Imagist

Ezra Pound. His Imagist group was a major influence on the Objectivists. He also introduced many of the Objectivists to each other and enabled the Objectivist issue of Poetry magazine.

Charles Reznikoff standing on a bus in Brooklyn, reading a WC Williams poem

a young George Oppen, fishing on the cover of the recently published Selected Poems

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The Objectivist poets were a loose-knit group of second-generation Modernists who emerged in the 1930s. They were mainly American and were influenced by, amongst others, Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams. more...

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The basic tenets of Objectivist poetics as defined by Louis Zukofsky were to treat the poem as an object, and to emphasise sincerity, intelligence, and the poet's ability to look clearly at the world.

The core group consisted of the Americans Zukofsky, Williams, Charles Reznikoff, George Oppen and Carl Rakosi, and the British poet Basil Bunting. Later, another American poet, Lorine Niedecker, became associated with the group. 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. Although these poets generally suffered critical neglect, especially in their early careers, and a number of them abandoned the practice of writing and/or publishing poetry for a time, they were to prove highly influential for later generations of writers working in the tradition of modernist poetry in English.

Roots

The period 1909 to 1913 saw the emergence of Imagism, the first consciously avant garde movement in 20th century English-language poetry. Pound, who was Imagism's prime mover, served as foreign editor of Harriet Munroe's magazine Poetry. In October 1912, he submitted three poems each by H.D. and Richard Aldington under the label Imagiste. Aldington's poems were printed in the November issue, and H.D.'s appeared in the January 1913 issue. The March 1913 issue of Poetry also contained Pound's A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste and F. S. Flint's essay Imagisme. This publication history meant that this London-based movement had its first readership in the United States. It also meant that Imagism was available as a model for American Modernist poets of the next generation.

Zukofsky was one such poet. He published a poem in Poetry in 1924 and introduced himself to Pound in 1927, when he sent the older poet his \"Poem beginning 'The,'\". Pound published the poem in his magazine The Exile, and a long correspondence and friendship between the two began. This relationship was strengthened by Zukofsky's 1929 essay on Pound's long work in progress The Cantos. Pound also provided an introduction to William Carlos Williams, another former Imagist who was living in New Jersey. Zukofsky and Williams quickly became close friends and were to be literary collaborators for the rest of Williams's life.

Another of Zukofsky's literary mentors at this period was Charles Reznikoff, a New York poet whose early work was also influenced by Imagism. By 1928, the young American poet George Oppen had become friendly with Zukofsky and Reznikoff. Another young American poet, Carl Rakosi, started corresponding with Pound around this time, and the older poet again put him in contact with Zukofsky. 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 1923, Bunting met Pound in Paris and, once again, a close literary friendship developed. In 1930, Bunting published his first collection of poetry, Redimiculum Matellarum, and Pound introduced him to Zukofsky.