[In the following essay, Kenner discusses the early Objectivist poetry of Oppen and Louis Zukovsky in relation to the socio-economic circumstances of the 1930's.]

It was a bleak year, 1931, the breadlines hardly moving. “The world,” George Oppen wrote at about that time, “… the world, weather-swept, with which one shares the century.”¹ It was a world in which someone approaching the window “as if to see / what really was going on” saw rain falling. All of which seems easy, pictorial, the Pathetic Fallacy in fact: a rainy day as emblem for a rainy time. Oppen's poem, though, encloses the falling rain amid many syntactic qualifications, and our first sense of it is apt to be not of an image but of a single sentence so intricate we're never quite sure we've grasped it whole.

The knowledge not of sorrow, you were
          saying, but of boredom
Is—aside from reading speaking
          smoking———
Of what, Maude Blessingbourne it was,
          wished to know when, having risen,
“approached the window as if to see
          what really was going on”;
And saw rain falling, in the distance
          more slowly,
The road clear from her past the window-
          glass———
Of the world, weather-swept, with which
          one shares the century.

This is the untitled first poem in Oppen's Discrete Series which the Objectivist Press published in 1934, and having just carefully copied it out I'm aware anew that it's virtually impossible to reproduce it from memory with perfect accuracy, although it clings to the memory. It is full of seemingly arbitrary decisions. How many lines has it? Seven? Fourteen? I was about to say it had seven capital letters, making the other seven elements look like runovers, but even that isn't true, since “approached,” in a flush-left position, lacks a capital. And the dash after “Is,” like an open parenthesis, promises a mate it never finds, the poem's other two dashes being twice as lengthy. We may eventually want to elide all the poem's middle, and read for its kernel sentence just the first twelve words and the last ten:

The knowledge not of sorrow, you were
          saying, but of boredom
Is …
Of the world, weather-swept, with which
          one shares the century.

When we do that we're aware of three persons, the speaker, “you,” and “one,” to which cast of characters the elided middle section adds a fourth, Maude Blessingbourne (someone we know?—perhaps) and even a fifth, whoever spoke the words, carefully attributed by quotation marks, that say how Maude moved, having risen. To be told that Maude Blessingbourne is to be found in Henry James's “The Story in It” makes less difference than you'd expect.

I'll not labor this, though I could linger on the syntax, its careful engineering, its look of improvisation. I'll say only in summary that more and more comes out of the poem as we linger with it, and that though at first glance it's apt to seem built around a glimpse of someone at the window glimpsing emblematic rain, it turns out to create a populous, complex, difficult world for its gray mood to pervade. A Discrete Series, Oppen later explained, is a series of numbers wherein no rule permits one to guess the next term; his example was 14, 18, 23, 27, 33, which looks arbitrary but in fact corresponds to the stops of the uptown Manhattan subway: the numbers, you see, dictated not by numerical laws but by history, by long-forgotten accidents of city planning. So the poem's words, this analogy implies, are specified neither by prosodic laws nor by syntactic, but by a complex reality to which it is faithful. And this is why it is so difficult to memorize its local accuracies, since mnemonic systems are guided by poetic symmetries this poem invokes only to evade them.

The February 1931 Poetry printed Louis Zukofsky's “Sincerity and Objectification,” with its homemade lexicography:

          An Objective: (Optics)—The lens bringing the rays
from an object to a focus. That which is aimed at.
(Use extended to poetry)—Desire for what is objectively
perfect, inextricably the direction of historic
and contemporary particulars.

This is worded to guide future dictionaries, and among other things states that the poem deals with particulars, among which the historic and the contemporary are inextricable, like those forgotten Manhattan determinations, commercial, social, architectural, which today's subway stops register.

“Each word,” Zukofsky went on to say, “in itself is an arrangement, … each word possesses objectification to a powerful degree.” A one-word poem, even, seems thinkable, and not the least strange moment in that anthology of strangenesses, Zukofsky's long poem “A,” is the appearance, after fifteen movements spread through several hundred pages, of a sixteenth movement that has only four words, carefully disposed on white space.² “The objectification which is a poem, or a unit of structural prose, may exist in a line or very few lines,” Zukofsky had written in 1931; still, “the facts carried by one word are, in view of the preponderance of facts carried by combinations of words, not sufficiently explicit to warrant a realization of rested totality such as might be designated an art form.” That nevertheless the one-word poem is a thinkable lower limit is a fact to remind us that words, one by one, encapsulate “historic and contemporary particulars.” Speaking of his collected short poems, Zukofsky said, “The words are my life.” And he said in the same statement that the poet's form “is never an imposition of history, but the desirability of making order out of history as it is felt and conceived.”

For the endlessly surprising thing about Zukofsky and Oppen, ministering to the bewilderment that has attended them from their first publication until now, is their balance between verbal algebra and the demands of what they could not pretend to control. The predominantly verbal poet, of whose ways Swinburne may serve as example, feels obligated to no such balance, writing for instance “in a land of sand and ruin and gold” with no need to imagine that land, its time, its name, its geography, content so that word leads into word, offsets word. On the other hand, writing enthralled by a subject's particularities may be graceless, settling for lurid fact: “The blown-up millions—spatter of their brains / And writhing of their bowels and so forth.” (That is Browning.) Still, either convention is clear and gives readers no difficulty. The exacting objectivist ambition was to keep the poem open to the entire domain of fact, and simultaneously to keep it a thing made of words, which have their own laws.

The domain of fact, moreover, had received its exegete in Karl Marx, and of nothing were Zukofsky and Oppen more fully persuaded in 1931 than of the pertinence of dialectical materialism to all human experience. They had what hindsight discloses to be complementary but classic revolutionary backgrounds. Oppen (who had the money for a while to grubstake their publishing activities) was born in 1908 into a family sufficiently affluent for repudiating affluence to seem a matter of conscience, while Zukofsky was born in 1904 into a working-class, Russian Jewish family—its only member to be born in America—and in due course got radicalized at Columbia College in the 1920s. He was close to Whittaker Chambers, in whose Witness he figures as “the guy with the eyebrows,” after the suicide of Chambers's brother “Ricky” wrote an elegy that is now the third movement of “A,” and was recruited by Chambers for the party.

There followed a Keatonian comedy. He was taken to a meeting like a scout for induction and aroused the suspicions of shrewd Ma Bloor herself. She had vehement doubts of his proletarian credentials (“My father pressed pants all his life,” he would interject, telling the story). He was a bourgeois intellectual, was her verdict. Willow-slim, pulled forward as if by the weight of his own eyebrows, he seemed an implausible stormer of any moneyed Bastille, not even a forcible pusher of leaflets. Ma Bloor's verdict was final, and Zukofsky, debarred from membership, soon cooled in fervor though he retained a lifelong respect for Marx's intelligence. As for Oppen, after Discrete Series (1934) he dropped poetry for a third of a century, organized workers, also moved to Mexico, where he lived as a cabinet worker and tool and die maker.

Anyhow reality, for these young men when they were in their twenties, was dialectical materialist reality: the sensible, physical world interacting with physical brains. How to make poems from that? Hymns to The Worker might have been acceptable, but bombardment of the senses by particulars disclosed no apotheosizable Worker—what Walter Lippman, in a genial gibe at John Reed, had called “a fine statuesque giant who stands on a high hill facing the sun.” Poetry, moreover, existed, like all things, in history, which by 1931 had disclosed certain things about its nature.

Words move, exist, in time; and the formal problem of the poem may be described in this way: How may a work strung out in time justify its beginning, its ending, and its progress from its first word to its last? There appear to be several main ways. The poet can tell a story, like Homer or Wordsworth. He can construct an argument, like Lucretius or Donne. He can follow the promptings of a tune, like Sappho or Swinburne.

A fourth, less canonical way is to make as if to describe a picture, as Rossetti did in “The Blessed Damozel”; continue till its detail is accounted for; then stop. This had been a satirical mode; it is related to the ancient convention of the character sketch and underlies Chaucer's portraiture in the General Prologue. More than one satire of Marvell's is headed, “Instructions to a Painter.”

The story, the argument, the tune, the picture. But novels had long since preempted the story, making versified stories seem quaint (one senses that Edwin Arlington Robinson in Tristram is struggling with a dead convention). And the knack of interesting argument in verse was long ago lost, perhaps with the mathematicization of argument, which made verbal equivalents seem either cumbersome or slick. Music—the tune—had been Ezra Pound's recourse, the poem prolonged till it fills out and resolves a melodic figure its first words imply, and in the long run it was to be Louis Zukofsky's guiding analogy likewise. But in 1931 he pointed out what was to be the underlying procedure for the short “Objectivist” poem, writing “An Objective (Optics)—The lens bringing the rays from an object to a focus.” As the first great decade of social photography opened, the decade of Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Margaret Bourke-White, the poem was directed to work, with leisured sophistication, like the photograph.

This seems, in retrospect, a natural development of the dominant verbal movement of two decades before, so-called imagism, in 1931 only eighteen years in the past. “An Image,” Pound had said, “an intellectual or emotional complex in an instant of time.” He had probably not been thinking of the snapshot, but nothing in his formulation precludes it. Imagism, William Carlos Williams was to remark, had, however, “no formal necessity implicit in it.” By the 1930s it had long since “dribbled off into so-called ‘free verse,’” and the poem had become “formally non-extant,” stopping arbitrarily after being shaped haphazardly.³

To think of rays being brought to a focus, though, is to think of a necessary configuration, its geometry obligated by physical laws. Through the lens stream photons responsive to the randomness of the physical world, the world that is simply there: “historic and contemporary particulars.” They impinge on the plate, arriving (if all is well) at a focus when they are just where the plate is. Not all of the random given world is entailed, only what the geometry of circular ray-cone and rectangular plate can comprise together. And the resultant image, fixed in chemicals, drained of color, is arrayed in massed patterns of monochrome, with, however trivial the subject, the special authority of law. And, for the camera as not for the painter, there are no trivial subjects: it receives all equally, accords equal status to all. And resolving the patterns of monochrome into a “picture” is a culturally learned skill: savages cannot do it, and typically see in photos “of” themselves about what the casual reader sees in a Zukofsky poem.

The “image” of imagism, for Pound an almost mystical perception, was apt in lesser hands to degenerate into a picture. Objectivist intuition forfended that particular degeneration—Zukofsky is the least pictorial poet one can think of—because its analogy for the poem was not the photograph but the photographic process, recreated in slow motion. This process is restricted to today's world (there were no photographs before there were cameras), and today's world's prime realities, though technological, may receive mysterious inflection from human presence: you can tell an Oppen poem as you can tell a Dorothea Lange photograph, though neither Oppen nor Lange in the old declaiming way has made a statement, and Lange's kind of camera is available to anyone much as Oppen's brain is anatomically indistinguishable from anyone else's (“nerves, glandular facilities, electrical cranial charges,” wrote Zukofsky of the organism—his own—that shaped the words we are reading about it).

Photographs introduced representational art to a new theme, the indifference of the subject. Zukofsky's “To my wash-stand” (1932) is a sharp-focus monochromatic study of something that would no more, once, have attracted poets than a plumbing fixture would have attracted painters:

                    To my wash-stand
in which I wash
                    my left hand
and my right hand
                    To my wash-stand
whose base is Greek
                    whose shaft
is marble and is fluted
                    To my wash-stand
whose wash-bowl
                    is an oval
in a square
                    To my wash-stand
whose square is marble
                    and inscribes two
smaller ovals to left and right for soap …

We can imagine all that in a fine glossy black-and-white eight-by-ten: it is part of the new sensibility of the 1930s. And so is the close-up of a cracked tile that can look like a face:

                    … so my wash-stand
in one particular breaking of the
                    tile at which I have
looked and looked
                    has opposed to my head
the inscription of a head
                    whose coinage is the
coinage of the poor
                    observant in waiting
in their getting up mornings
                    and in their waiting
going to bed
                    carefully attentive
to what they have
                    and to what they do not
                                        have …

The poem ends,

                    an age in a wash-stand
and in their own heads

—“inextricably the direction of historic and contemporary particulars.” Neither the poem nor the fugue of attention it reenacts would have been thinkable before that decade: a decade partly characterized by poor folk who rise and go to bed and have maybe no amenity for keeping themselves clean—not even anything as simple as that. This wash-stand comes to seem a luxury, even, and one operative word, emphatic as early as the first line, is “my.” Zukofsky's cosmos pivots on little worlds.

Oppen in Discrete Series was less hermetic if not less subtle; the poems go by like snapshots in an album.

Bad times:
The cars pass
By the elevated posts
And the movie sign.
A man sells post-cards.

And:

It brightens up into the branches
And against the same buildings
A morning:
His job is as regular.

And:

Town, a town,
But location
Over which the sun as it comes to it;
Which cools, houses and lamp-posts,
          during the night, with the roads——
Inhabited partly by those
Who have been born here,
Houses built—. From a train one sees
          him in the morning, his morning;
Him in the afternoon, straightening——
People everywhere, time and the work
          pauseless:
One moves between reading and re-reading,
The shape is a moment.
From a crowd a white powdered face,
Eyes and mouth making three——
Awaited—locally—a date.

These glimpses, carefully composed and accented, enforce nothing save a certain emptiness. Men exist in the physical world, always have: but exist now aimlessly, going as their machines go, their images going as their glass surfaces go:

Closed car—closed in glass——
At the curb,
Unapplied and empty:
A thing among others
Over which clouds pass and the
                                        alteration of lighting,
An overstatement
Hardly an exterior.
Moving in traffic
This thing is less strange——
Tho the face, still within it,
Between glasses—place, over which
                                        time passes—a false light.

That was how it was; and as to how the poems were, they bespoke the 1930s in a certain necessary thrift, using every word impartially, notably the little monosyllables: place, over, which, time, passes, a, false, light. … That semantic monotone declares a decade, marking such poems off sharply from the shaggy diction of Williams a decade earlier, with his “reddish, purplish, forked, upstanding / twiggy stuff of branches and small trees,” much as their lenslike objectivity has replaced Williams's brio and zest.

Small words of course were part of the young century's mystique. Perhaps remembering how Stephen Dedalus feared “those big words which make us so unhappy,” Ernest Hemingway made his Lt. Henry declare that words such as glory, honor, courage, hallow, were obscene. Hemingway implied that small words were more honest because closer to the testimony of the senses. Oppen thought rather that little words were potent because we are sure what we all agree about when we use them: without them, he has said, we really are unable to exist. “I believe that consciousness exists and that it is consciousness of something,” and we share consciousness most fully in words like sun and stone and grass. He wrote in the 1960s of how we manage with less substantive words, making do as we always must:

The steel worker on the girder
Learned not to look down, and does his work
And there are words we have learned
not to look at,
Not to look for substance
Below them. But we are on the verge
Of vertigo.
There are words that mean nothing
But there is something to mean.
Not a declaration which is truth
But a thing
Which is. It is the business of the poet
“To suffer the things of the world
And to speak them and himself out.”

“But there is something to mean:” yes: and Oppen is always accessible because some substantial perceived thing is always there. Zukofsky, more philosophically inclined by far, a lifelong reader of Spinoza and in later years a connoisseur of the spiky Wittgenstein, was fascinated by the little words that do not even name: the prepositions, the articles. “To my washstand:” my is a pivot word, and so is to, commencing as in “An Ode to …” and altering its import part way through the poem. At twenty-three, perhaps remembering that Pound had begun the Cantos with “And,” Zukofsky wrote “Poem beginning ‘The’” and got Pound to publish it in the Exile. That was perhaps a mite cheeky. But his lifelong work called “A,” a poem fascinated for close to fifty years by the intimate processes of language, pours the public and private events of half a century—“inextricably the direction of historic and contemporary particulars”—through an intricate grid of rules as austere as Euclid's, dominated by the taxonomies of the indefinite article, which says of everything that it is “a” something, itself yet one of a kind. As late as 1938 Marx was still supplying “A” with materials, but by then no hope lingered, if there had ever been any, that the poem would make a difference to the masses. Zukofsky had by then become the most hermetic poet in the American language: as hermetic as Mallarmé: an odd destiny for a poetic that had once meant to register objectively the social and material world of the dialectic. Oppen's poetry, though less difficult, has no more hortatory relevance. When he turned full time to activism he simply gave writing up, for decades.⁴

How poetic language may be related to social change remains an unsolved question. It may be that there is no such thing as social change, that such a phrase gets uttered only in the throes of romantic dream, that only details can change, and techniques, and formulations. Still, Ma Bloor was clearly right to reject the guy with the eyebrows, and Oppen to choose years of silence. The only American poetry that had its roots in the 1930s brought the premises of the decade—objectivity, comprehensiveness, literature exact as science—to conclusions no one intuited any better than Ma Bloor, and that histories still pass over in baffled silence.

Notes

1. Oppen's poems are found in George Oppen, Collected Poems (New York: New Directions, 1975).

2. Louis Zukofsky, “A” (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979). See also Louis Zukofsky, All, 1923-58 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1965).

3. William Carlos Williams, Autobiography (New York: Random House, 1951), p. 264.

4. For further light, see L. S. Denbo's interviews with both poets in Contemporary Literature 10 (1969): 159-77, 203-19; L. S. Denbo, “The Existential World of George Oppen,” Iowa Review 3 (Winter 1972); and special issues devoted to Oppen and Zukofsky respectively by Ironwood 3, no. 1 (1975) and Maps 5 (1973).