The Objectivists were a group of left-wing, mainly Jewish American poets who formed a brief though important alliance in the 1930s, when they felt poetry needed a new identity. The guiding principles of Objectivist poetry were fresh vocabulary and musical shaping, drawing on a stripped-down but radiant language of images and perceptions. The core of the group was formed by Louis Zukofsky, George Oppen, Charles Reznikoff and Carl Rakosi, but Lorine Niedecker, Kenneth Rexroth and Muriel Rukeyser were affiliated players, as well as Basil Bunting in Britain. They are especially interesting to us today because they took up the challenge of experiment with a modern ambitious lyric poetry sharpened by their experience of the new metropolitan city. In the Objectivists' heyday, the Depression years, they laid down examples which have been picked up in turn by the Black Mountain Poets and the Beat Generation, and later by Postmodernism, and which still remain fruitful. The trademark smartness and brevity of Objectivist poetry, along with a vital commitment to the spirit of the century, make Andrew McAllister's anthology an exciting and relevant book for a new generation of poetry readers.

Outstanding poets and critics present cultural readings of the Objectivist poets, a group whose works have been largely unexamined.

THE 25TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION—The definitive statement of Ayn Rand’s philosophy as interpreted by her best student and chosen heir. This brilliantly conceived and organized book is Dr. Leonard Peikoff’s classic text on the abstract principles and practical applications of Objectivism, based on his lecture series “The Philosophy of Objectivism.” Ayn Rand said of these lectures: “Until or unless I write a comprehensive treatise on my philosophy, Dr. Peikoff’s course is the only authorized presentation of the entire theoretical structure of Objectivism—that is, the only one that I know of my knowledge to be fully accurate.” In Objectivism, Peikoff covers every philosophic topic that Rand regarded as important—from certainty to money, from logic to art, from measurement to sex. Drawn from Rand’s published works as well as in-depth conversations between her and Peikoff, these chapters illuminate Objectivism—and its creator—with startling clarity. With Objectivism, the millions of readers who have been transformed by Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead will discover the full philosophical system underlying Ayn Rand’s work.

Today man's mind is under attack by all the leading schools of philosophy. We are told that we cannot trust our senses, that logic is arbitrary, that concepts have no basis in reality. Ayn Rand opposes that torrent of nihilism, and she provides the alternative in this eloquent presentation of the essential nature--and power--of man's conceptual faculty. She offers a startlingly original solution to the problem that brought about the collapse of modern philosophy: the problem of universals. This brilliantly argued, superbly written work, together with an essay by philosophy professor Leonard Peikoff, is vital reading for all those who seek to discover that human beings can and should live by the guidance of reason.

A collection of essays that sets forth the moral principles of Objectivism, Ayn Rand's controversial, groundbreaking philosophy. Since their initial publication, Rand's fictional works—Anthem, The Fountainhead, and Atlas Shrugged—have had a major impact on the intellectual scene. The underlying theme of her famous novels is her philosophy, a new morality—the ethics of rational self-interest—that offers a robust challenge to altruist-collectivist thought. Known as Objectivism, her divisive philosophy holds human life—the life proper to a rational being—as the standard of moral values and regards altruism as incompatible with man's nature. In this series of essays, Rand asks why man needs morality in the first place, and arrives at an answer that redefines a new code of ethics based on the virtue of selfishness. More Than 1 Million Copies Sold!

Based on a series of lectures given in 1983 by Dr. Leonard Peikoff, Understanding Objectivism offers a deeper and more profound study of Ayn Rand's philosophy, and outlines a methodology of how to approach the study of Objectivism and apply its principles to one's life. For the legions of readers who treasure Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, and who savor cogent analysis and provocative discussion of Ayn Rand's thoughts and beliefs, Understanding Objectivism takes the stimulating study of Rand's philosophy to the next level.

"Poetics and Praxis 'After' Objectivism includes an introduction, ten chapters, and a roundtable afterward--all of which have been written specifically for this volume. The collection examines late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century poetic praxis within and against the dynamic, disparate legacy of Objectivism and the Objectivists. This is the first volume in the field to study this vital legacy through current poetic praxis, renewing the complexities of the past in terms of the difficulties of the present. The book's scope investigates the continuing relevance of the Objectivist ethos to poetic praxis in our time, examining and exemplifying generative intersections of creativity and critique" --

The New American Poetry: Fifty Years Later is a collection of critical essays on Donald Allen’s 1960 seminal anthology, The New American Poetry, an anthology that Marjorie Perloff once called “the fountainhead of radical American poetics.” The New American Poetry is referred to in every literary history of post-World War II American poetry. Allen’s anthology has reached its fiftieth anniversary, providing a unique time for reflection and reevaluation of this preeminent collection. As we know, Allen’s anthology was groundbreaking—it was the first to distribute widely the poetry and theoretical positions of poets such as Charles Olson, Allen Ginsberg and the Beats, and it was the first to categorize these poets by the schools (Black Mountain, New York School, San Francisco Renaissance, and the Beats) by which they are known today. Over the course of fifty years, this categorization of poets into schools has become one of the major, if not only way, that The New American Poetry is remembered or valued; one certain goal of this volume, as one reviewer invites, is to “pry The New American Poetry out from the hoary platitudes that have encrusted it.” To this point critics mostly have examined The New American Poetry as an anthology; former treatments of The New American Poetry look at it intently as a whole. Though the almost singularly-focused study of its construction and, less often, reception has lent a great deal of documented, highly visible and debated material in which to consider, we have been left with certain notions about its relevance that have become imbued ultimately in the collective critical consciousness of postmodernity. This volume, however, goes beyond the analysis of construction and reception and achieves something distinctive, extendingthose former treatments by treading on the paths they create. This volume aims to discover another sense of “radical” that Perloff articulated—rather than a radical that departs markedly from the usual, we invite consideration of The New American Poetry that isradical in the sense of root, of harboring something fundamental, something inherent, as we uncover and trace further elements correlated with its widespread influence over the last fifty years.

The Cambridge Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Poetry is designed to give readers a brief but thorough introduction to the various movements, schools, and groups of American poets in the twentieth century. It will help readers to understand and analyze modern and contemporary poems. The first part of the book deals with the transition from the nineteenth-century lyric to the modernist poem, focussing on the work of major modernists such as Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, and W. C. Williams. In the second half of the book, the focus is on groups such as the poets of the Harlem Renaissance, the New Critics, the Confessionals, and the Beats. In each chapter, discussions of the most important poems are placed in the larger context of literary, cultural, and social history.