George Oppen and the Limits of Words

It’s a good time—a good decade—to think about Oppen. On the one hand, we have learned—perhaps too well—to suspect any claims that the superior invention in a work of art gives a modern artist superior access to truths about social or individual life. On the other hand, we have learned—perhaps too thoroughly—to seek, in the writers we study, signs of commitment to ethical desiderata, support for programs of social justice, and an awareness, if not indeed a kind of guilt, about the conditions of privilege which helped many modernists learn to write as they did.

Oppen and his poems thus seem made for us. A clear inheritor, like the other Objectivists (Charles Reznikoff, Louis Zukofsky, Lorine Niedecker), of goals associated with William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound, but also a man of the left—and, for most of the 1930s, a committed communist—Oppen gave up writing for twenty-odd years rather than subordinate his poetic goals to Party aims. In his heyday, from the early 1960s to the mid-1970s, he managed to react to public history, to meditate in verse on political responsibility, while doing justice to his own reserve. Oppen innovated while striving for humility, and pursued claims about ethics and obligation, without ever seeming to tell his readers (often, without even seeming to know himself) what we ought, as citizens or as human beings, to do. His poems pursued both ethics and ontology, along with American and Jewish history: what must we say, what must we never say, living and writing, for example, during the Vietnam War, and after the Holocaust?

Critics have so far served Oppen well. Since his death in 1984 we have seen anthologies devoted in part to essays about him; starring or supporting roles for his poetry in influential synoptic arguments about modernist writing generally; important scholarly editions, such as Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s volume of Oppen’s correspondence and Michael Davidson’s New Collected Poems; and lecture series and conferences devoted to Oppen alone.¹ The first such conference took place at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) in 1986, when that institution acquired Oppen’s papers: the latest, at the time of writing, will take place in the fall of 2008 at Edinburgh University. (Michael Heller has become—with DuPlessis and Davidson—a considerable authority on Oppen: Heller’s Speaking the Estranged: Essays on the Work of George Oppen [Cambridge: Salt Publishing, 2008] unfortunately appeared too late to be covered here.)

It is, therefore, a surprise to learn that Peter Nicholls’s concise and ardently researched study appears to be the first monograph on Oppen from a university press. It will be the standard book about him for a while. The prolific Nicholls maps Oppen’s career, quotes treasures from the UCSD archive, and pursues a consistent claim—at once aesthetic, epistemological, and ethical—about what Oppen the writer tried to do. That claim reflects close attention to Oppen’s ideas—but it may not always fit the poems.

Nicholls’s chapters split Oppen’s career into phases, most of which correspond with his books of verse. Each chapter connects Oppen to writings whose influence on the American poet has gone undetected, or relatively uninterpreted, until now. Thus Jacques Maritain’s Creative Intiution in Art and Poetry (1953) helped Oppen return to poetry in the late 1950s, when Oppen put Maritain’s “existential certainties” to “non-transcendental uses” (GO, 33, 31); the resulting poems, collected in The Materials (1962), also “convey the sense of confinement, exclusion and loneliness” from Oppen’s sparsely-documented decade in Mexico (GO, 50). This In Which (1965) reflects Oppen’s engagement with Heidegger, “much noticed...