The text as self-defined sanctum structured the aesthetic blueprint for this early century offshoot of Imagism. Led by William Carlos Williams, this minimalist school published An 'Objectivist' Anthology in 1932. In it, poets George Oppen, Charles Reznikoff, Louis Zukofsky, and Williams... [more]
The text as self-defined sanctum structured the aesthetic blueprint for this early century offshoot of Imagism. Led by William Carlos Williams, this minimalist school published An 'Objectivist' Anthology in 1932. In it, poets George Oppen, Charles Reznikoff, Louis Zukofsky, and Williams held that a poem should be apprehended for its own sake as a discrete and specific structural entity, and not its symbolic or emotional subtext or the intent of the author. The aesthetic goes against description because it drains energy from the poem; instead, Objectivist poets felt the poem should enact, not describe. 'Some of us are writing to say things simply so that they will affect us as new again,' Zukofsky explained.
Sincerity -- that is, the perfection of the meter and form to the last detail of artistic integrity -- was the ideal. Their affinity for the definite and precise image echoed that of the Imagists, while their preoccupation with the objective contemplation of a fully self-sustained, fully harmonized object was their own. The poets relied upon the sensuousness of concrete objects, like Williams' famous 'red wheelbarrow,' and literal (as opposed to figurative) language to compose a structure of relationships apprehensible as a whole ' after all, 'so much depends/upon the red wheelbarrow.'
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