A Test of Poetry was first published in 1948 and reissued in 1964. We are living in strange and violent and unusual times. I am afraid that life has caught up and extinguished such as Allen Tate, Lionel Trilling, Louis Zukofsky. We will no longer accept dry and safe bread. Poetry is going into the streets, into the whorehouses, into the sky, into the picnic basket, into the whiskey bottle... The true test of poetry is that it fits every man everywhere.
There are some poems like this in this book but Zukofsky talks about everything else. There goes another idol. There go another 165 well-printed pages that might have crawled with love and blood and laughter, that might have gone good with beer and salami sandwiches, that might have made the next morning better instead of that trained slippery nostalgia of horror slipping through the curtains to fall upon me like a mother-axe.