A History of American Literature

Making It New: 1900–1945 363

And the point in the spectrum

where all lights become one,

is white and white is not no-color

as we were told as children

but all-color;

where the flames mingle

and the wings meet, where we gain

the arc of perfection, we are satisfied, we are happy,

we begin again;

In this sense, H.D.’s trilogy stands, along with Pound’s Cantos and William

Carlos Williams’s long poem Paterson, as a major work of the Imagist genius and

a modernist epic.

As H.D.’s work suggests, Imagism – or, to be more exact, the impulses that brought

Imagism into existence – could lead off in a number of different directions. One of

these was Objectivism, associated in particular with William Carlos Williams, George

Oppen, Louis Zukofsky, and Charles Reznikoff. In February 1931 Poetry brought out

a special Objectivist issue edited by Zukofsky, who specified as required reading

Pound’s xxx Cantos, Williams’s Spring and All, Eliot’s The Waste Land and “Marina,”

e.e. cummings’s Is 5, Marianne Moore’s Observations, and Wallace Stevens’s

Harmonium. A press was founded, financed by George Oppen, and in 1932 under

the name of To Publishers it brought out An “Objectivists” Anthology. Edited by

Zukofsky, it included work by Williams, Oppen, Reznikoff, Carl Rakosi (1903–2004),

and Kenneth Rexroth. Pound was represented by his “Yittischer Charleston” and

Eliot by “Marina.” Shortly after this, To Publishers became the Objectivist Press,

under the general editorship of Zukofsky and Williams. The main differences

between Imagism and Objectivism were a greater emphasis on the formal structure

of the poem, its physical contours, and a more intense interest in its musical proper-

ties, the aural dimension as compared with the visual. But Objectivism grew dialecti-

cally out of Imagism – not in opposition to it but in fruitful tension with it, not least

because both movements shared the core modernist beliefs: precision, exactitude,

experience rendered rather than stated, the imperatives of organic rhythm and form.

The poet associated with Objectivism in whom the concern with music, sound, is

at its strongest is Louis Zukofsky (1904–1978). “The order of all poetry,” he insisted,

“is to approach a state of music wherein the ideas present themselves sensuously and

intelligently and are of no predatory intention.” For him, and in his work, meaning

is subordinated to sound. In his literary essays, for instance, he has spoken of his

own poetry as a “process of active literary omission,” involving a conscious rejection

of crude metaphor and symbolism and an exploitation of typography in order to

demonstrate “how the voice should sound.” The individual word becomes an object,

its sound and look more important than its meaning, and the poem becomes a

score: a score investigating the possibility that the order and movement of sound in

a poem might itself create a flux and reflux of emotions underlying the literal sig-

nificance of the words. All of this may make Zukofsky’s work seem intolerably

abstract. In fact, as even a brief glance at All: The Collected Shorter Poems (1966) will

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