And he himself was a paradoxical figure: before World War II, a left-wing hyper-experimentalist who wrote for social justice; after WWII, when the avowed Fascist and assiduously anti-Semitic Ezra Pound was in disgrace, Zukofsky remained loyal to Pound's poetics. Throughout his decades of near-anonymity, however, he persevered in his epic ambitions and finished "A" in 1974, almost a half-century after he began it and four years before his death in 1978.
Zukofsky was born on the Lower East Side in 1904 to Yiddish-speaking parents. He attended Columbia University, where he became an ardent student of modernist poetry. He soon got in touch with Pound and William Carlos Williams, and thanks to Pound's efforts, edited an issue of Poetry magazine in 1931, where he introduced an ad hoc group he labeled "Objectivists." As with "A", the quotation marks were part of the title. In hindsight, this group, which included George Oppen, Charles Reznikoff, and Lorine Niedecker, was a significant moment in the history of American poetry. But at the time there was little response, none of it positive.
Zukofsky had already begun "A". Even though he was not yet 25 and had barely broken into print, he picked the most brashly ambitious model for his project: Pound's ongoing Cantos. The politics didn't match up: The young Zukofsky was a Marxist, Pound an enthusiast for Mussolini. But the wager to write an open-ended long poem was similar. "A" was to unite poetry and politics, bringing serious art of all eras into close contact with the present. From the beginning, Zukofsky planned to write 24 sections, which he called movements, as if the poetry were music.
