SOURCE: "From A to An: The Postmodern Twist in Louis Zukofsky," in Sagetrieb, Vol. 10, No. 3, Winter, 1991, pp. 37-62.

In the following essay, Comens asserts that Zukofsky's poetry heralds postmodernism through the negation of the absolute.

Despite the acknowledged importance of World War I for the beginning of literary modernism, little attention has been paid to the impact of World War II on its endings. Yet it was the second war that precipitated the indefinite deferral of Pound's earthly paradise, and with it the end of The Cantos. And it was the war that compelled Williams's

Drawing by the prominent author and scholar Guy Davenport. Here, he has juxtaposed Zukofsky and the title of his masterpiece, "A".

urgent struggle to complete Paterson. Norman Cousins's 1945 declaration that "modern man" was "obsolete" in the aftermath of the Bomb suggests both the apocalyptic rhetoric of the time and the shared sense that...