ABSTRACT
Charles Reznikoff was born on August 31, 1894, in Brooklyn, the son of Nathan and Sarah Yetta Reznikoff. He married Marie Syrkin in 1930 and has been managing editor of the Jewish Frontier since 1955. He has devoted his whole life to literature and whatever he does is characterized by meticulously fine workmanship. His work has had some influential detractors as well, it is perhaps only fair to add. Marius Bewley, in one of his books, has a scathing notice of Reznikoff, whom he mentions in the course of a more extended attack upon Kenneth Burke. He proposes to give an impressionistic account of what it was like to live in the United States between the years 1885 and 1910 in five volumes of what he calls "recitative". The poet Hayden Carruth, who had been very enthusiastic about the volume of selected poems of Reznikoff which had appeared in 1962, gave this latest book a very bad review in Poetry.
