7.02.2007

1950

“It is no accident that Pound and Williams both were involved variously in a movement which got called ‘objectivism’. But that word was then used in some sort of a necessary quarrel, I take it, with ‘subjectivism’. It is now too late to be bothered with the latter. It has excellently done itself to death, even though we are all caught in its dying. What seems to me a more valid formulation for present use is ‘objectism’, a word to be taken to stand for the kind of relation of man to experience which a poet might state as the necessity of a line or a work to be as wood is, to be as clean as wood is as it issues from the hand of nature, to be as shaped as wood can be when a man has had his hand to it. Objectism is the getting rid of the lyrical interference of the individual as ego, of the ‘subject’ and his soul, that peculiar presumption by which western man has interposed himself between what he is as a creature of nature…and those other creations of nature which we may, with no derogations, call objects.” --Olson