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. Ignatow’s self-awareness in “The Bagel,” for example, is heightened by his use of everyday language and his concentrated focus on the symbolism of the bagel.

Generally, Ignatow’s discussion of America is lauded—especially American obsession with success and money. He was a sharp observer of the difficulties of urban life but equally ready to write about domestic life. He didn’t shy from paranoia or the absurd but wrote of it in such a realistic way that it achieved a sort of commonality. Further, Ignatow was less a callous observer of human suffering than someone humanely engaged with it. Wary to create absolutes or dictate how poetry should be written, Ignatow tried to render the inner life as he saw it and to offer understanding and sympathy for the human condition. In Notebooks (1964), Ignatow noted, “it is my duty to speak of myself and my mixed heritage, to speak of myself purely if I would perform the same feat myself as an American, a Jew, a world contemporary, a skeptic, and a desperate believer in the One” (a link to The Notebooks of David Ignatow is listed in Further Reading).