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Poet of Exile
- Abstract
WHEN Charles Reznikoff died in January 1976, at the age of eighty- one, he had only recently begun to be generally recognized as an important American poet of the mid-century decades. Until the New Directions selection of his poems in 1962, By the Waters of Manhattan, all of the dozen volumes of verse he had up to then produced had been published privately-some actually set in type by the poet himself-or by the small Objectivist Press, “an organization of writers,” as its jacket blurb, written by Reznikoff, announced, “who are publishing their own work and that of other writers whose work ought to be read.” After the focus of activity in the Objectivist group (to which we shall return) during the 30′s, Reznikoff receded as a visible presence in American poetry, and I would suppose that for the next two decades he figured in most readers’ minds, if at all, as a culturally pious Jewish genre poet, his verse on topics of Jewish history and on biblical or rabbinic motifs appearing in periodicals like the Menorah Journal, the Jewish Frontier (which he edited from 1955), Midstream, and COMMENTARY.
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