The Exaction of Song: Louis Zukofsky and the Ideology of Form

Abstract

The principle of austerity has taken many forms in modernist art: masks, pure geometric form, the armadillo surfaces of Marianne Moore or the minimalism of Wallace Stevens, the hieratic sculptures of Jacob Epstein or Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. Often postmodern poetry attempts to reintegrate the sentimentality denied by modernist aesthetics. In Louis Zukofsky's epic A, this shift in sensibility is displayed in his turn away from both formalism and a Marxist theory of value. An excessive formalist rigor is present in the early movements: the sonnet sequence of A -7 and the first canzone of A -9 are principally formal experiments, while the collage texts of A -6 and A -8 exhibit another kind of formal austerity. In the second half of A -9, Zukofsky dramatically overturns the Marxist theory of value developed in A 's first eight movements. Its Spinozist defense of love and sentiment prefigures the open forms, sentimentality, and increasing hermeticism of A 's later movements. Already in the first half of A -9 there are elements which strain against Zukofsky's overt Marxism. On questions of the origin of value and the nature of language, Zukofsky wavered between Marxist social theory and romanticism.