Objectivism (poetry)

The Objectivists were a loose-knit group of second-generation Modernist poets who emerged in the 1930s, members of a poetic movement within the broader movement of literary Modernism known as Objectivism. The group consisted primarily of American nationals and was influenced by Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, among other contemporaneous writers. The basic tenets of Objectivist poetics, as defined by Louis Zukofsky, were to treat the poem as an object and to emphasize sincerity, intelligence, and the poet's ability to look clearly at the world. While the name of the movement is the same as that of Ayn Rand's school of philosophy, the two movements are not affiliated.

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.