Oppen, George - Norman M. Finkelstein (essay date 1981)
Norman M. Finkelstein (essay date 1981)
SOURCE: “Political Commitment and Poetic Subjectification: George Oppen's Test of Truth,” in Contemporary Literature, The University of Wisconsin Press, Vol. XXII, No. 1, Winter, 1981, pp. 24-41.
[In the following essay, Finkelstein argues that Oppen resolves the conflict between ethics and aesthetics in his poetry through “interpenetration of the subject's reaction to the object.”]
As an heir of modernist poetics, George Oppen, like all poetic inheritors, appears simultaneously as disciple and iconoclast. For Oppen, Pound is a fairly remote mentor and Williams is an older pioneer. The ground they broke becomes the foundation of a literary venture that both reinterprets and challenges modernist poetics on formal and ideological grounds. Oppen and his fellow objectivists may be seen as the followers of a well-established modernist tradition, a view best expressed by Hugh Kenner: “They are...
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