 louis zukofsky (january 23, 1904 â may 12, 1978) was an american poet. he was one of the founders and the primary theorist of the objectivist group of poets and thus an important influence on subsequent generations of poets in america and abroad. ==life== zukofsky was born in new york city's lower east side to lithuanian jewish parents, father pinchos (ca. 1860-1950) and mother chana (1862â1927), both religiously orthodox, a tradition against which zukofsky reacted early. pinchos immigrated to the united states in 1898, working as a pants-presser and night watchman in new yorkâs garment district until he could send for his wife and children in 1903. the only one of his siblings born in america, louis zukofsky grew up speaking yiddish and frequented yiddish theatres on the bowery, where he saw works by shakespeare, ibsen, strindberg, and tolstoy performed in yiddish translations. he read henry wadsworth longfellow's the song of hiawatha and aeschylus's prometheus bound in yiddish, too. his first real contact with english was when he started school, but, being a fast learner, he had read all of shakespeare's works in the original by the age of eleven. although zukofskyâs family was poor, and though he could have gone to the city college of new york for free, his parents sent him to the expensive columbia university where he studied philosophy and english; some of his teachers and peers were to become important figures of culture, namely mark van doren, john dewey, john erskine and lionel trilling. having failed to complete the institution's undergraduate physical education requirement, zukofsky graduated with a m.a. in english in 1924. zukofsky's master's thesis was the earliest version of his long essay "henry adams: a criticism in autobiography"; his fascination with henry adams was to persist through much of his career. adams's late and rather recondite ideas about the progression of "phases" in history would greatly influence zukofsky, and the form of his adams essay, the vast majority of which is quotation from adams's works, looks forward to zukofsky's mature compositional methods in both criticism and poetry, where collaging of quotation lies at the heart of his writing. zukofsky began writing poetry at university and joined the college literary society, as well as publishing poems in student magazines like the morningside. one early poem was published in poetry but never reprinted by zukofsky. he considered ezra pound the most important living poet of his youth. in 1927, he sent his poem poem beginning "the" to him. addressed mostly to the poet's mother, the poem was in part a parody of t. s. eliot's [[the was
1904_births 1978_deaths 20th-century_American_poets American_people_of_Lithuanian-Jewish_descent Columbia_University_alumni Jewish_American_poets Jewish_American_writers Objectivist_poets People_from_Port_Jefferson,_New_York Poets_from_New_York