1901-1940

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.

A broadly defined multinational cultural movement (or series of movements) that took hold in the late 19th century and reached its most radical peak on the eve of World War I. It grew out of the philosophical, scientific, political, and ideological shifts that followed the Industrial Revolution, up to World War I and its aftermath. For artists and writers, the Modernist project was a re-evaluation of the assumptions and aesthetic values of their predecessors. It evolved from the Romantic rejection of Enlightenment positivism and faith in reason. Modernist writers broke with Romantic pieties and clichés (such as the notion of the Sublime) and became self-consciously skeptical of language and its claims on coherence. In the early 20th century, novelists such as Henry James, Virginia Woolf, and Joseph Conrad experimented with shifts in time and narrative points of view. While living in Paris before the war, Gertrude Stein explored the possibilities of creating literary works that broke with conventional syntactical and referential practices. Ezra Pound vowed to “make it new” and “break the pentameter,” while T.S. Eliot wrote The Waste Land in the shadow of World War I. Shortly after The Waste Land was published in 1922, it became the archetypical Modernist text, rife with allusions, linguistic fragments, and mixed registers and languages. Other poets most often associated with Modernism include H.D., W.H. Auden, Hart Crane, William Butler Yeats, and Wallace Stevens. Modernism also generated many smaller movements; see also Acmeism, Dada, Free verse, Futurism, Imagism, Objectivism, Postmodernism, and Surrealism. Browse more Modern poets.

A group of Southern poets associated with the Fugitive, a literary magazine produced in the early 1920s. Its prominent ranks included Randall Jarrell, Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, and Robert Penn Warren. In general, their poetry was formal and featured traditional prosody and concrete imagery frequently drawn from the rural Southern experience. These poet-critics’ principles gave rise to the method of close reading and textual analysis known as New Criticism.

An early 20th-century poetic movement that relied on the resonance of concrete images drawn in precise, colloquial language rather than traditional poetic diction and meter. T.E. Hulme, H.D., and William Carlos Williams were practitioners of the imagist principles as laid out by Ezra Pound in the March 1913 issue of Poetry (see “A Retrospect” and “A Few Don'ts”). Amy Lowell built a strain of imagism that used some of Pound's principles and rejected others in her Preface to the 1916 anthology, Some Imagist Poets. Browse more imagist poets.

A poetic movement in England during the reign of George V (1910–1936), promoted in the anthology series Georgian Poetry. Its ranks included Rupert Brooke, Siegfried Sassoon, Walter de la Mare, Robert Graves, A.E. Housman, and D.H. Lawrence. The aesthetic principles of Georgian poetry included a respect for formalism as well as bucolic and romantic subject matter. The devastation of World War I, along with the rise of modernism, signaled the retreat of Georgian poetry as an influential school. Browse more Georgian poets.

Surrealism is an artistic philosophy that took hold in 1920s Paris and spread throughout the world in the decades that followed. André Breton outlined his idea of its aims in his Surrealist Manifesto (1924), affirming the supremacy of the “disinterested play of thought” and the “omnipotence of dreams” rather than reason and logic. Early surrealists were inspired by Freudian psychoanalysis and its emphasis on the power of unconscious thought. Through automatic writing and hypnosis, surrealists believed they could free their imaginations to reveal deeper truths. The French poets Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Valentine Penrose, and Guillaume Apollinaire embodied early surrealist principles. 

Some contemporaries of the surrealists who did not ascribe to Breton’s manifesto or were not a part of his circle employed similar practices. Surrealist practices were used in the visual arts, particularly in the paintings of Frida Kahlo, Salvador Dalí, Leonora Carrington, and René Magritte, and in the films of Jean Cocteau and Germaine Dulac. A second generation of surrealist writers emerged in other parts of the world, especially in Latin America; see the poems of Joyce Mansour, Alejandra Pizarnik, and Octavio Paz. The surrealist aesthetic has influenced modern and contemporary poets writing in English as well, including Dorothea Tanning, James Tate, John Ashbery, and Michael Palmer.