Oppen, George - Paul Zweig (essay date 1973)
Paul Zweig (essay date 1973)
SOURCE: “Making and Unmaking,” in Partisan Review, Vol. XL, No. 2, 1973, pp. 273-76.
[In the following assessment of Of Being Numerous, Zweig praises Oppen's poems as “tightly wrought meditations” that are “sculptural in their precision.”]
The fortunes of reputation are strange. For thirty years, George Oppen received the highest praise from men like Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, yet his work was virtually unknown, even among poets. The fashions came and went. Proletarian poetry in the 1930s and 40s; bland rhetorical poetry in the 1950s; imagist surreal poetry in the 1960s. At long intervals, Oppen published volumes of difficult, tightly written poems: four volumes in thirty years. Not a prolific writer, not a representative of familiar fashions or schools. Even the free-wheeling tastes of the 1960s seemed not to affect George Oppen's isolation. Then in 1969, to the general...
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