Moral philosophy can be divided into two major fields: metaethics, which concerns the meaning and status of moral language, and normative ethics, which centers on what we ought to do. An ancient controversy in metaethics is that between moral realism, the view that moral language states facts about the world, and moral subjectivism, the view that moral language expresses the attitudes of speakers. Moral language seems to have both the characteristics of fact-stating discourse as well as some of the characteristics of expressions of attitudes. The challenge of metaethics is to reconcile the object-relatedness of realism with the motivational insight of subjectivism. Such a view must hold that valuing is contextual, object-directed, and constrained by biology, psychology, and history. Such a view is demonstrated through an investigation of the concept of intrinsic value.

This chapter proposes that Louis Zukofsky’s ongoing work on his long poem “A” was animated by a strong investment in restoring a sense of language’s historical and material situatedness – its social ontology – as a means of combatting what Zukofsky and other contemporary writers saw as its vulgarization within an emerging commodity culture. I argue that in the eighth and ninth sections of “A,” written between mid 1935 and early 1940, Zukofsky equates labor and language, revealing both to be historically contingent and socially produced. I begin the chapter by returning to the debate between Zukofsky and Ezra Pound over the concept of the commodity to reveal an under-discussed aspect of their quarrel, namely its basis in the two poets’ attitudes concerning language’s relation to materiality. I then move on to align the treatment of the commodity in “A”-8 and (the first half of) “A”-9, an often-discussed aspect of these sections, with their seldom noted but equally important thematization of language. Focusing on the equivalences the poem draws between labor and language, I claim that the project of restoring both to their concrete historical conditions of social production furnishes a key to reading Zukofsky’s long poem.

In Chapter 2, I discuss theories of objectivism, or the requirement that all genuine knowledge be observer-independent and/or neutral. I provide a brief outline of objectivist accounts and distinguish these from objectivity. Drawing on historical analyses, I show how objectivity in science refers to a set of practices aimed at reducing variability in the recording and transmission of observations, but that objectivism is an overgeneralization of these practices into an incoherent epistemological mandate. I argue that objectivism is illusory, both because knowledge can never be produced independent of a historically situated knower and also because neither individuals nor human systems can be neutral. Objectivism, I claim, can only be performative and so serves as a cover for, rather than a defense against, institutionalized forms of privilege. Objectivist practices also dehumanize the subjects of scientific labor and so anesthetize the moral responsiveness of those who produce and consume research.

Lola Ridge is an exemplary case of an overlooked Irish woman poet of major talent, whose life and career failed to follow a conventional path, and who is only now receiving her full critical due. Born in Dublin, Ridge lived in Australia and New Zealand before settling in the United States, where she was active in leftist politics. Previous critics of Ridge have seen her Irishness as accidental rather than essential, but this is to downplay the ways in which her Irishness interacts with transnational poetics in the modernist age. Her first book, The Ghetto, is a striking example of the urban modernist lyric, comparable to the work of Mina Loy and Muriel Rukeyser, while her broader links to Imagism and Objectivism are dynamic and, for an Irish poet of the time, remarkable. Sensitive portraits of working-class and immigrant-class life are a particular forte. Irish politics are also a felt presence, however, as in her third book Red Flag. Looking forward to Adrienne Rich as much as to Eavan Boland, Ridge is a poet very much of our time, and one who belongs at the centre of the modern Irish canon.

The account developed in Chapter 2 may seem to conflict with Kant’s view that the judgment of taste is a distinctive sort of judgment requiring critical investigation. It has been argued, on the other hand, that Kant’s view is confused: there is no sense of “subjectivity” that sets the judgment of taste apart from other judgments (such as judgments of color) that also lay claim to normativity but present no special problem. This chapter addresses both objections. My reading suggests a requisite sense of “subjectivity.” The judgment of taste is subjective for two related reasons. The first has to do with its essential singularity, which, as I elaborate it, is more radical than the denial of principles or the holism of reasons associated with aesthetic or moral particularism. The second reason is tied to the distinctiveness of the judgment of taste’s claim to normativity. I argue that the judgment of taste represents its object as calling for recognition, where aesthetic recognition should be understood as akin to the acknowledgment of a person. My account yields an explanation of the “autonomy” of taste, according to which one’s judgment of taste must be grounded in one’s own experience of the object.

Ezra Pound has influenced many poets in many ways, both during his lifetime and posthumously. He brought great influence to bear upon his peers about how poetry should be written, establishing and broadcasting the tenets of poetic modernism in English, offering models for how poems could be both far shorter and far longer at the same time as achieving greater focus and covering a broader range of subject than the pre-modernists imagined. Pound’s interventions around T. S. Eliot’s verse offer the most direct example of that influence. Despite acknowledging that Eliot, uniquely among American writers, ‘had actually trained himself and modernized himself on his own’ (SL 80), Pound worked extensively on Eliot’s work, perhaps most directly in the transition between Eliot’s Poems (1920) and The Waste Land (1922), which saw Eliot initially interpreting Pound’s Imagist concision in Poems, through their shared interest in Théophile Gautier, before adopting a more expansive Poundian ideogrammic method in The Waste Land.