Callman Rawley | Biography

Carl Rakosi is perhaps best known as a founding "Objectivist" poet, part of a literary movement marked by both the transitory nature of association by publication and the longevity of its poets' individual careers. The Objectivists were originally promoted by Ezra Pound in the 1930s as a new generation of poets capable of answering the excesses of imitative and overblown contemporary poetry with the correction of an unmediated focus on the objective world. The Objectivist directive was to treat the poetic object without superfluous metaphors or metaphysics and thereby bring new technological precision to the poet's acts of sight and insight. In his essay introducing the Objectivists to the world in the pages of Poetry, member Louis Zukofsky defines the terms of Objectivism narrowly, using as examples the "objective" of a microscope or the poem itself as a physical and formal "object." During the course of their lengthy careers, however,...
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