The Poetics of the Limit: Ethics and Politics in Modern and Contemporary American Poetry

This book situates Louis Zukofsky’s poetics, and the lineage of Objectivist poetics more broadly, within a set of fundamental ethical concerns in American poetic modernism. Tim Woods makes a strong case for Zukofsky as a missing key figure within this ethical matrix, viewing Zukofsky’s poetry through the lens of the work of Theodor Adorno and Emmanuel Levinas. Building an ethical genealogy of American poetics leading from Zukofsky through the contemporary school of L•A•N•G•U•A•G•E poetry, Woods brings together modernism and postmodernism, ethics and aesthetics, to shed new light on our understanding of this neglected strain of modernist poetics.