The Bagel

David Ignatow was a Jewish poet from Brooklyn who lived most of his life in New York City. He often wrote about working class people in urban environments. His influences as a poet started with a love of British Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley’s politically charged poems which criticized the monarchy. In adulthood, his poetic mentors were William Carlos Williams—a prominent American Imagist—and Charles Reznikoff, who was associated with the Objectivists. Both influences are evident in Ignatow’s poetry.

Imagism was a 20th-century poetic style in which the poet concentrated on an image in precise, common language generally using non-metrical and nonrhyming lines—a style Ignatow consistently employed. From Williams, Ignatow learned to guard against elevated language and obscure metaphor. In 1964, he credited Williams for offering the “only important values: the sanctity of life, of the person, of the being in continual process, which shall have poems to say it” (Wegner). Objectivism was a form of Imagism in which the poem itself is also an object and therefore, self-referential. The poet’s sincerity and objective vision of the world is ideally heightened throughout a single work. Reznikoff, a leader in the movement, became a mentor to Ignatow.