Politics
In his early years, Zukofsky was a committed Marxist. While studying at Columbia, his friend, Whittaker Chambers, sponsored him for membership in the Communist Party, though it is unclear whether he actually joined. While he associated with Party members and published in Party-associated magazines, his poetry, which while strongly political was resolutely avant-garde and difficult, found little favor in Party circles. Though Zukofsky considered himself a Marxist at least through the end of the 1930s, the focus of his work after 1940 turned from the political to the domestic. Much later, he would claim that reading Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire finally turned him away from Marx.
Read more about this topic: Louis Zukofsky
Famous quotes containing the word politics:
“The so-called consumer society and the politics of corporate capitalism have created a second nature of man which ties him libidinally and aggressively to the commodity form. The need for possessing, consuming, handling and constantly renewing the gadgets, devices, instruments, engines, offered to and imposed upon the people, for using these wares even at the danger of one’s own destruction, has become a “biological” need.”
—Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979)
“Politics is war without bloodshed while war is politics with bloodshed.”
—Mao Zedong (1893–1976)
“Political organizations have slowly substituted themselves for the Churches as the places for believing practices.... Politics has once again become religious.”
—Michel de Certeau (1925–1986)