Louis Zukofsky

Louis Zukofsky  (January 23, 1904 – May 12, 1978) was an American poet.

His Jewish parents moved to the United States from the part of the Russian Empire that is now Lithuania. His family spoke Yiddish. He was the first member of his family to be born in the United States, on the Lower East Side of New York City.

His first experiences with literature came by reading and going to performances of Shakespeare, Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg and Leo Tolstoy in the Yiddish language.

At Columbia University he read new and experimental writing by James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound. He made a strong connection with Pound by writing letters to him. Pound asked Harriet Monroe to let 27-year-old Zukofsky be the guest editor of the February 1931 edition of Poetry magazine. This edition printed poems by writers that Zukofsky called "Objectivists."

Zukofsky's main work was a long, book-length poem called "A" (the title has the quotation marks). He worked on this from 1928 until 1974, four years before his death.

Books

An "Objectivists" Anthology, ed. Louis Zukofsky (1932)
Anew (1946)
A Test of Poetry (1948)
"A" 1–12 (1959)
Bottom: on Shakespeare (1963)
All: The Collected Short Poems, 1923–1958 (1965)
All: The Collected Short Poems, 1956–1964 (1966)
"A" 13–21 (1969)
"A" 24 (1972)
"A" 22 & 23 (1975)
"A" (complete, 1978)

 Related pages 
List of poets from North America

References

Other websites
Louis Zukofsky at PennSound

Category:1904 births
Category:1978 deaths
Category:American poets