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.” The Objectivist poets were a loosely affiliated group of Modernist American poets who were interested in these concepts and were writing in the 1930s and ’40s.
Harriet Monroe famously solicited an edition of Objectivist work for Poetry guest-edited by Louis Zukofsky, who expanded the term and attempted to articulate its principles in the February 1931 issue. Zukofsky noted that the Objectivist poets were imagists rather than symbolists, and they were concerned with creating a poetic structure that could be perceived as a whole, rather than a series of imprecise but evocative images. He included Charles Reznikoff, George Oppen, Carl Rakosi, and the British poet Basil Bunting in the issue. The poet Lorine Niedecker later became closely associated with the movement.
Some critics and scholars believe that the Objectivist poets did not see themselves as a coherent “movement,” but rather as a group of poets with some shared interests and ideas about poetry, art, and politics. Zukofsky claimed in Prepositions: The Collected Critical Essays (Wesleyan University Press, 1967) that they only used the term Objectivism because Monroe insisted they have a name for their movement in the issue of Poetry. Regardless, not only was the movement tremendously influential on American and British poetry, but that issue of Poetry magazine served as a blueprint for other movements.
Although the movement was short-lived and did not receive much critical attention in the 1940s and ’50s, groups of younger poets in the United States and England “rediscovered” the Objectivist poets in the 1960s. Objectivist poets would influence The San Francisco Renaissance of the 1950s, the Beat poets, Language Poetry, the Black Mountain poets, and the British Poetry Revival, among others.
For more on Objectivism, read Peter O’Leary’s feature, “The Energies of Words”. Browse Objectivist poets.