Of Being George Oppen: A Review of Peter Nicholls’s George Oppen and the Fate of Modernism

Part biography, part literary criticism, and part a theoretical rethinking of the term modernism itself, George Oppen and the Fate of Modernism is a brilliant new study of a major American poet. Delving into the archives, Peter Nicholls provides both fresh documentary material and a comprehensive analysis of Oppen’s little-known life and often difficult works. Thanks to his rigorous and lucid argumentation, Nicholls brings Oppen’s poems into focus against a little understood and complex philosophical background. George Oppen and the Fate of Modernism is thus both a useful introduction and an indispensible work for anyone interested in studying the poet.