Oppen, George | Introduction
George Oppen 1908-1984
(Full name George August Oppenheimer) American poet.
INTRODUCTION
Oppen was one of the founders of Objectivism, a movement in American poetry during the early 1930s dedicated to extending Imagism by making the poem itself an object. After his first volume, Discrete Series, appeared in 1934, Oppen stopped writing poetry and became a labor organizer in the Communist Party. It was not until the late 1950s that he began writing poetry again, becoming a leading figure in a new wave of Objectivism, and a significant influence on the generations of poets who succeeded his. In 1969, his book Of Being Numerous (1968) won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.
Biographical Information
Born into a wealthy family in New Rochelle, New York, Oppen endured a painful childhood. His mother, in the midst of a nervous breakdown, committed suicide when Oppen was four. His father's second marriage, when Oppen was nine, “opened upon me,” Oppen has written, “an attack totally murderous, totally brutal, involving sexual attack, beatings.” When he was ten, the family moved to San Francisco. Six weeks before his high school graduation from Warren Military Academy, apparently drunk, Oppen had a car accident in which another person was killed. He was expelled from school and his family sent him to travel in Europe. Returning to the United States, he finished high school and enrolled in Oregon State University. He studied poetry, and, there, he met Mary Colby. On their first date, they stayed out all night. She was expelled; he was suspended, but elected to leave as well. The two had decided to become poets and set out on a life of travel and experience rather than academic discipline. They married and hitchhiked throughout the United States together and finally settled in New York City, where they met William Carlos Williams, Louis Zukovsky, and Charles Reznikoff. In 1929, supported by a monthly income inherited from his mother, the Oppens moved to France, and visited Ezra Pound in Italy. Oppen wrote and ran To Publishers, the press he established which published the new Objectivist poets as well as Pound and Williams. Because of the poetic radicalism of Objectivism and the reluctance of booksellers to handle paperbacks, the business was unsustainable. Anti-Semitism, the first waves of fascism, and Pound's political allegiance to it contributed to their returning to the United States. In 1935 the Oppens joined the Communist Party and worked as labor organizers until 1941. At the beginning of the Second World War Oppen worked at Grumman Aircraft, and was, therefore, exempt from the draft. As a Jew, Oppen felt responsible to fight against Nazism; he left that job so he would be drafted. In 1944 he was seriously wounded. After his discharge from the army with a Purple Heart, he and Mary withdrew from political work, but supported Henry Wallace for president in 1948. In 1949, FBI agents began investigating them, and they fled to Mexico to avoid testifying before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, which could force them to name suspected Communists or go to jail. While in Mexico, Oppen managed a furniture factory and still did not write. In 1958, with the demise of McCarthyism, the Oppens were granted passports and returned to the United States. On the trip back, he has told interviewers, after a dream which told him he would not rust, Oppen began writing poetry again. He also maintained his social commitments, marching on Washington in opposition to the Vietnam War, and supporting the Civil Rights movement. Though Oppen continued to write and to publish, to give public readings, and to grant many interviews, he also shunned fame, faced crises of confidence, and turned down more invitations to read than he accepted. He died of Alzheimer's disease in 1984.
Major Works
The greater part of Oppen's poetry from The Materials (1962) through Primitive (1980) was written after his period of political activity and exile. It is nevertheless recognizably like the verse of his first book Discrete Series: experimental, laconic, compressed, syntactically disjunctive, sparsely punctuated, and projecting disconnected, not always fully formed images. The subject of his poems include dislocation, alienation, and debasement of the individual personally and collectively in a culture in which humane values have eroded, corporate rules and rigid structures are pervasive, the idea of “humanity” itself is dubious, and words have lost meaning. It is a lyric poetry concerned not with the self of the poet, with myth or psychology like so much modern poetry, but with the actualities of the world out of which the self is constructed, and with the concreteness of the words which reproduce the world. Despite the fact that Of Being Numerous is often thought of as his major work, it is truer to Oppen's art as well as to his politics to see his work as a collection of separate parts that contribute meaning to each other and derive meaning from the whole. The poems establish themselves as word-objects built to represent the things, the actualities of the world as they are, not to render a pre-existing meaning or a narrative discourse about the world or the poet's consciousness. In all his work, Oppen attempted to reveal the phenomenological reality of the world reduced to its essence. As a poet, as much as a political organizer, his concern was to impinge upon consciousness with concrete words as objects in order to challenge reality by charging consciousness with vision.
Critical Reception
Oppen's poetry is more highly esteemed than well known. Discrete Series was lauded by Pound and Williams; his 1968 volume Of Being Numerous was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. Poetry magazines such as Ironwood, Paideuma, and Sagetrieb have devoted entire issues to him. Denise Levertov described his art as representing ongoing process rather than achieved work. Donald Davie has called his poetry “earnest, elegant, and touching.” Hayden Carruth, however, dismissed Oppen as “having a fine mechanic's sense” and declined to include any of his work in his 1970 anthology of American poetry. Nevertheless, Oppen's poetry is well represented in many anthologies including the Berg/Mezey collection of “American poetry in open forms,” and Voices within the Ark: The Modern Jewish Poets. There also is a large body of appreciative Oppen scholarship concerned with explicating his poetry, understanding its connection to movements such as Cubism and Abstract Expressionism, relating it to his politics and to his life, and exploring its connection to the work of philosophers important to him, especially to Heidegger and Kierkegaard. In his last years, Oppen was awarded the PEN/West Rediscovery Award, and was honored by the American Academy of Arts and Letters and by the National Endowment for the Arts.
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