Oppen's Silence, Crusoe's Silence and the Silence of Other Minds

Truthfulness is far from a social virtue—but it is poetic IT IS THE EXTREME LIMIT OF THE POETIC IMAGINATION

—George Oppen

Most studies of poetry begin with a poem. This one begins with a silence. Like a poem, a silence has both occasion and duration. The duration of this silence is a well-known quantity; after the 1934 publication of his slim volume Discrete Series, the poet George Oppen stopped writing poems, decisively abandoned the class of his origin ("upper class of '29," as he liked to say) to join the Communist Party, and, starting in 1950, lived as a "known subversive" in Mexico to escape F.B.I. harassment for his work as a labor organizer in the Workers Alliance. He would not write another poem for almost 25 years.¹

The occasion of Oppen's silence is less well understood. Considered as an episode in the history of American literary communism, Oppen's story appears at first unexceptional. In 1930, Michael Gold in the New Masses had condemned the "verbal acrobatics" of modernism as "only another form of bourgeois idleness."² The aesthetics of the "Objectivist" poets with whom Oppen is associated would come under special censure for expressing what Herman Specter would call:

The limited worldview of a "detached bystander": that is, of a person whose flashes of perception for the immediate esthetics of the contemporary scene are not co-ordinated in any way with a dialectical comprehension of the life-process . . . The fatal defect of Objectivist theory is that it identifies life with capitalism, and so assumes that the world is merely a waste land. The logical consequence is a fruitless negativism. . . . Impartiality is a myth which defeatists take with them into oblivion.³

Two years after Gold's broadside, Sherwood Anderson would suggest that the problem of art was not limited to a particular aesthetic theory or style—"impartial" rather than appropriately partisan, nihilistically "objective" about the world as found rather than actively "co-ordinated" with "objective" laws of history by which revolution must eventually be made; it was a more fundamental problem with the nature of artistic labor. On this view, a truly committed artist could best demonstrate his alliance with the working classes by joining them and silencing himself entirely: "if it be necessary that in order to bring about the end of a money civilization and set up something new, healthy and strong, we of the so called artist class have to be submerged, let us be submerged."⁴ The annals of the 30s are filled with the mute inglorious Miltons of the left, submerged for better or worse—deliberately or against their will—in the interest of a radical politics.⁵

What makes this particular story more remarkable—what marks it as an episode in the history of what I prefer to call a radical poetics—is that Oppen, once submerged, resurfaced. His next book, The Materials, published in 1962 initiated Oppen's spare but uninterrupted second act in poetry, which would eventually earn him the Pulitzer Prize (for the 1968 volume Of Being Numerous).

The long silence at the center of Oppen's career is a mystery sustained by attempts to resolve it, which range from Hugh Kenner's semi-serious denial of the need for explanation (Kenner to Oppen: "it took you 25 years to write the next poem,")⁶ , to Rachel Blau DuPlessis' excesses of explanation: "a critique of modernism which ran counter to contemporary critical, poetic, and academic thinking, a choice of activism in a deeply felt political crisis, a process of self-testing, a war injury, and recovery; later these were joined by a set of taboos and inhibitions around parenthood, and a fear of his own power" (Selected Letters, xiv).

The poet's own slim self-accounting for the occasion of his silence is more interesting than a long pause, more specific than a catalogue of...