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"Wonderfully strange and covertly influential . . . the first volume of an essential series." —Publishers Weekly
A classic comparative study of poetry from Homer to the 20th century, reissued for today's readers.
By juxtaposing several translations of the same passage from Homer; an elegy from Ovid and lines from Herrick that read like an adaptation of Ovid; or a 15th-century poem about a rooster and a contemporary poem about white chickens, Louis Zukofsky has established a means for judging the values of poetic writing.
A wonderful education for the fledgling poet, this handbook, first published in 1948, is the best elucidation of Zukofsky's "objectivist" premises for recognizing value in specific instances of poetry.
"A Test of Poetry has changed over the years into something much more than a mere testing for information. It has become a signature examination, and expression, of the structure of meaning -- as intertextuality, as self. Confronting the test/text of his own life, Zukofsky passes with honors." —American Book Review
"A necessary book for anyone interested in poetry." —Rosmarie Waldrop
Click here for TABLE OF CONTENTS
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LOUIS ZUKOFSKY (1904 - 1978) was born on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. His early work, including his first published poem, "Poem Beginning 'The'," strived to establish the poem as object by employing syntactic fragmentation and line breaks that disrupt normal speech rhythm. Zukofsky invented the term "objectivist" and is widely considered one of the primary forerunners of contemporary avant-garde writing. His many books include "A", Prepositions, Bottom: on Shakespeare, The Complete Short Poetry, and The Collected Fiction.
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