From Materialism to Romanticism: The Philosophical Progression of George Oppen’s Poetry

Though the objectivists have, until recently, been marginal to traditional accounts of twentieth-century American poetry, the influence of objectivism on the development of the postmodern avant-garde has been undeniable. Particularly for the experimental Language poets who emerged in San Francisco and New York in the 1970s and 1980s, the objectivists represented an alternative to the high modernism of T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, and company. For Charles Bernstein, Lyn Hejinian, and Ron Silliman, among many others, objectivism—a movement that emerged in the 1930s and has been associated with Marxian politics, Jewish identity, and the city of New York—offered a version of modernism that is not only poetically innovative but politically progressive as well. But despite the objectivists’ influence on later poets, their critical reception has been somewhat delayed. This delay may be attributed, at least in part, to the publishing history of the poets themselves. Though Louis Zukofsky first theorized objectivist poetics in 1931, and Charles Reznikoff—the oldest of the objectivist poets and a model for Zukofsky’s poetics—was publishing mature work in the 1910s, neither of these poets completed their major long poems until well into the second half of the century. Likewise, Basil Bunting, the lone British poet in the movement, and Lorine Niedecker, the only woman associated with early objectivism, wrote some of their most memorable verse in the 1960s. The quintessential example of delayed reception (and production, for that matter) is surely to be found in the life and writing of George Oppen, who abruptly stopped composing poetry in the mid-1930s and did not take it up again for twenty-five years. Then, beginning in 1962 with The Materials, Oppen proceeded to write a series of books that would profoundly influence the generation of experimental American poets coming of age during the Vietnam War.

In George Oppen and the Fate of Modernism, Peter Nicholls admirably recounts the development of Oppen’s poetry from his youthful Discrete Series (1934) to his final work, Primitive (1978). Nicholls’s book, the seven chapters of which are loosely keyed to Oppen’s seven books of poetry, is the third single-author monograph on an objectivist poet published in a decade. And like Mark Scroggins’s monograph on Zukofsky and Stephen Fredman’s on Charles Reznikoff, Nicholls’s text keeps close to the poetry.¹ Using for context Oppen’s notebooks, correspondence, and unpublished materials, Nicholls undertakes a biographically and philosophically rich close reading of the poet’s entire oeuvre. Especially elucidating is Nicholls’s account of Oppen’s engagement with the works of Heidegger and Hegel. In his reading of the poetry, Nicholls moves easily between broad philosophical frameworks and line-by-line explication, and in the process, he provides a thorough account of Oppen’s life and work. Moreover—and this is one of the book’s most unique and compelling arguments—Nicholls suggests that Oppen’s work shuns both “traditionalism” and “avant-gardism” (2). Avoiding these “two extremes of modernism,” the poet’s work instead aspires to “a poetics of being” that resists simplistic aesthetic categorizations. Nicholls’s conceptualization of Oppen’s poetry challenges any account of objectivism that attempts to reduce the movement to a form of derivative or uncritically belated modernism.

Nicholls supplements his criticism with literary biography, and the result is a series of historically thick close readings situated within the framework of Oppen’s life. He begins with a biographical overview that particularly focuses on the poet’s twenty-five-year hiatus from writing. Born in New Rochelle, New York, in 1908, Oppen survived several youthful tragedies, including his mother’s suicide and a fatal car accident that occurred while he was driving. After studying at Oregon State University, Oppen and his future wife, Mary Colby, traveled in the United States and France before settling in 1933 in New York City, where Oppen cofounded the Objectivist Press. Although the objectivist coterie was...