Oppen, George - Michael Heller (essay date 1985)
Michael Heller (essay date 1985)
SOURCE: “The Mind of George Oppen: Conviction's Net of Branches,” in Conviction's Net of Branches, Southern Illinois University Press, 1985, pp. 73-96.
[In the following essay, Heller characterizes Oppen's poetry as not merely reflecting the effect modern life upon the self, but rather showing the self investigating modern life.]
In one of George Oppen's poems, the poet is being driven around an island off the coast of Maine by a poor fisherman and his wife. The landscape, the lobster pots and the fishing gear, the harbor and the post office are passed, and the poet is, unaccountably, moved by a nearly metaphysical sense of passage. The experience is at once intimate and remote, and the poet is moved to exclaim to himself “difficult to know what one means /—to be serious and to know what one means—.”1 Such lines could be emblems for all of Oppen's entire career; for of all...
[The entire page is 7360 words long]
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