Objectivism is generally considered to be a discipline of poetic will and a critique of the forms of subjectivity descending from romanticism. Also it can be said that the tradition of Objectivism occupy a peculiar place both as late modernists and as early contemporary poets. But it is important to appreciate the difference between the forms of objectification at work within the poetics of Eliot and Pound and the kind of writing that Oppen and Olson define as Objectivism or Objectism. In the earlier modernism represented by Eliot and Pound, the self’s relation to other objects is generally construed as one of domination and is characterized by discontinuity and separateness. Therefore successful objectification entails the establishing of boundaries that divide the self from others. But in the objectivism, it is the poem that is objectified, and the poem exists as an autonomous object, an identifiable thing that we can look at out there in the world and encounter in an “open field” of recognition. Oppen’s and Olson’s definitions of “A poem as object” shift our attention from the mind’s power to interpret an object to “a series of objects in field” including the poem and the self, and leads a new way of American poetry beyond modernism.
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