Poetics and politics in the writings of Louis Zukofsky, Charles Olson, and the "Language" poets

This thesis examines the writings of the American `Objectivist' poet Louis Zukofsky, especially his poem `A', tracing various correlations between his poetics and the poetics of Charles Olson and the contemporary `Language' poets. Analysing the genesis of `Objectivist' writing, Zukofsky's central poetic problematic emerges as the need to reconcile conflicting aesthetic and political pressures within the American Left in the 1920s and 1930s. His answer to this dilemma is to develop an `autonomous' art, a collage aesthetic which can represent particulars without the coercive appropriation of the conceptual. In this search, `A' gradually develops a shift from manual to intellectual labour, and also explores ways to make language achieve the potential of music for non-conceptual representation. A concomitant shift from labour to love occurs in Zukofsky's poetics, particularly evident in `A'-9's and Bottom's interest in Spinoza, introducing an ethical basis which has direct parallels in the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. This phenomenological approach to the object which tries to bracket off the interference of the dominating subject, also has strong parallels with the non-identity philosophy of Theodor Adorno. From Zukofsky's and Adorno's use of collage and the `constellation' of objects, Charles Olson's work is brought into a new focus as a dialectical poetics. But unlike Zukofsky, Olson contradicts this dialectical stance with ontological positions, leaving The Maximus Poems in a state of uneven tension. Like Olson, Zukofsky increasingly moves towards the intricacies of linguistic operation in the later stages of `A'. Zukofsky develops a `doubling' structure in language -- where words conceal and reveal -- and this structure pervades his exploration of translation, history and narrative, and the possibility of a `musical' language. The thesis concludes by demonstrating how Zukofsky's marginalised poetic interests have found a new centrality in the concerns and writings of the contemporary American `Language' poets and their challenge to various forms of linguistic reification.