Critical consensus has long been reached on the trajectory of Louis Zukofsky's literary career. The story of the poet's move from a selfdefeating political verse in the 1930s to a liberating poetics of pure form after the war is well rehearsed. As the world continues to face the deleterious effects of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, it is a good time reconsider the priorities implicit in this narrative, and in doing so the literary history that has been forgotten in its construction. This chapter will chart the development of one of Zukofsky's key preoccupations: the presentation of historical particulars, seen here as a dialectic rooted in tensions between a materialist revolutionary politics on the one hand, and a modernist sense of tradition with Poundian, reactionary aesthetics on the other. In the argument below, Zukofsky's primary value lies in his work's embodiment of conflicts that go to the heart of the relationship between political vanguardism and the particular inheritance of Anglophone modernism. The lessons that Zukofsky offers the contemporary reader are in how his experimental political poetry straddles Anglophone modernism and social realism, whose separate tensions with avant-gardism are brought together to occasion a vanguard poetics in the fullest sense of the word. This chapter suggests that the overcoming of these difficulties in Zukofsky's later career, in large part through the celebrated trope of music, is less a solution to than an elision of the political, a surrender to formalism that we might see as the inevitable outcome of attempts to reconcile modernist ideals of aesthetic order with a radical political impulse to change the world.

Historic and contemporary particulars

Since the first essays on the Objectivist poets by Hugh Kenner and Cid Corman there has been an anxiety among commentators to decant the poets associated with the movement from the revolutionary cultural milieu that gave rise to their unique fusion of modernism and left-wing politics but at the same time made them seem naïve, political and topical.