Louis Zukofsky

Louis Zukofsky (January 23, 1904 – May 12, 1978) was an American poet. He was one of the founders and the primary theorist of the Objectivist group of poets and thus an important influence on subsequent generations of poets in America and abroad.

Zukofsky was born in New York City's Lower East Side to Lithuanian Jewish parents, father Pinchos (ca. 1860-1950) and mother Chana (1862–1927), both religiously orthodox, a tradition against which Zukofsky reacted early. Pinchos immigrated to the United States in 1898, working as a pants-presser and night watchman in New York’s garment district until he could send for his wife and children in 1903.

The only one of his siblings born in America, Louis Zukofsky grew up speaking Yiddish and frequented Yiddish theatres on the Bowery, where he saw works by Shakespeare, Ibsen, Strindberg, and Tolstoy performed in Yiddish translations. He read Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's The Song of Hiawatha and Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound in Yiddish, too. His first real contact with English was when he started school, but, being a fast learner, he had read all of Shakespeare's works in the original by the age of eleven.

Although Zukofsky’s family was poor, and though he could have gone to the City College of New York for free, his parents sent him to the expensive Columbia University where he studied philosophy and English; some of his teachers and peers were to become important figures of culture, namely Mark Van Doren, John Dewey, John Erskine and Lionel Trilling. He joined the Boar's Head Society and wrote for the Morningside literary journal. Having failed to complete the institution's undergraduate physical education requirement, Zukofsky graduated with a M.A. in English in 1924.

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