Glossary of Poetic Terms

The term Objectivism was originally coined by William Carlos Williams in 1930 and developed from his reading of Alfred North Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World (Macmillan, 1925). Williams described Objectivism as looking at a poem “with a special eye to its structural aspect, how it has been constructed.” See the related term Objectivist poets. Note: The term Objectivism is also used to describe a philosophical system developed by author Ayn Rand. While they share a name, these two movements are unrelated to each other.