[In the following essay, Crozier examines the poems in Oppen's first collection, Discrete Series.]

Although Of Being Numerous (1968) and Primitive (1978) are arguably George Oppen's mature achievement, rightly attended to and admired as such by many of his readers, these late works are rooted in and a fulfilment of his early work, which they comment on and acknowledge. Yet reference to Oppen's ‘early’ work incurs immediate uncertainty, since his career can be seen to possess two separate points of departure, first with the poems written during the late '20s and early '30s assembled in Discrete Series (1934), and again in the poems of the late '50s and early '60s collected in The Materials (1962). To what extent these different beginnings, and the issues raised by the suspension of Oppen's poetic career, either derive from or affect the character of his writing are questions that ask to be explored. To assert peremptorily, with Hugh Kenner, that ‘In brief, it took twenty-five years to write the next poem’ (although Oppen quotes this remark with approval and apparent relief) is to pre-empt several important questions.¹ To what extent is an Objectivist poetics carried over from Discrete Series into The Materials? If Oppen did not simply start again where he left off, to what extent is the poetics of The Materials responsive to his experience, in the intervening years, of political activism, skilled factory work, infantry combat, family life in post-war America, and political exile in Mexico? Kenner's impatient formula shrinks the issues to fit the case that the contours of Oppen's poetic career can be traced through an as-if uninterrupted series of poems, distorts the relationship between his life and his work and, above all, circumvents consideration of Oppen's politics.

In this essay I propose an account of Discrete Series that leads me to conclude that its connection with Oppen's subsequent writing is autobiographical. One way of formulating the difference of Discrete Series and The Materials, among others, is to point out that whereas in the former there is a recurrent focus on a woman as companion and sexual partner, and on women in general, the latter is pervasively informed by the presence of a child or daughter. Around this figure cluster new issues of age, memory, cultural transmission and temporal process, which both extend and subordinate preoccupations in Discrete Series with machinery, work, idleness, and the diverse present-day life of the modern city, all disposed in such a way that time implodes, so to speak, within the simultaneities of the poetic moment. Oppen's renewed poetic scrutiny of the world, after a prolonged lay-off, produced a more fluent, less cerebral account of what there is, in which value identifies itself more confidently in the things named than it did in the naming of things. As a corollary of this but, I would maintain, preconditionally, Discrete Series and The Materials confront us with different rhetorics. This in itself might be taken as evidence of a fundamental discontinuity in Oppen's work. It is in terms of these rhetorics, totalities of the formal and discursive procedures of the writing, that any reading of Oppen, especially, must answer for itself, so much otherwise does his work seem incommensurate with writing with which we stand on more familiar terms. By and large existing discussions of Discrete Series have tended to describe its formal qualities as embodiments of some of the given features of modern poetic style, and given little attention to any specific discursive assumptions they might be bound up with. The Objectivist notion of a poem as a made thing, as a machine, has tended to confer on the reductive, almost (it might seem) arbitrary writing of Discrete Series a craftsmanlike authority and prestige that have gone largely unargued. The language strategies and decisions implicit in the writing, of which it is the outcome, have been readily taken for granted, neither analysed nor justified in relation to the interpretations they enable or forestall.

Discrete Series was an almost belated event within a briefly coherent literary milieu, the imprint of which it bore clearly but ambiguously. Oppen was associated with a grouping of young poets, convened initially in the pages of Ezra Pound's Exile (1927-28), where work by Carl Rakosi and Louis Zukofsky appeared, at a moment when Pound was anxious to consolidate and put on record the achievement of the previous fifteen years, and was looking for American disciples into the bargain. Rakosi and Zukofsky were put in touch with each other, and also with William Carlos Williams and other native survivors of Pound's generation. Pound wished this small force of younger poets to manifest itself as the new generation, and arranged for Zukofsky to edit the February 1931 issue of Poetry for this purpose.²An ‘Objectivists’ Anthology (1932), edited by Zukofsky and published by Oppen, established more explicitly, though with less publicity, the short-lived connection of the new generation and their predecessors. There are grounds for seeing Pound's Active Anthology (1933), which included Zukofsky and Oppen, though not Rakosi, as a late manifestation of Objectivism, although Pound's waning interest can be inferred from his comment that many of the young poets seem to have ‘lost contact with language as language … in particular Mr Zukofsky's Objectivists seem prone to this error’.³ Nevertheless, when Discrete Series came out the following year it carried a Preface by Pound saluting ‘a serious craftsman, a sensibility which … has not been got out of any other man's books’.⁴

Oppen was by no means a prominent member of this milieu. He sponsored To Publishers, later The Objectivist Press, and saw to the production side of things. Apart from An ‘Objectivists’ Anthology the enterprise is best known for having published books by Williams and Pound. Oppen published very little of his own work: two poems in the February 1931 issue of Poetry that Zukofsky edited, and another four in January 1932; one poem in An ‘Objectivists’ Anthology; five in Active Anthology. Eight of the twelve were included in Discrete Series. His junior status was seized upon in reviews of his book. Not much good came to him either of Pound's Preface or an enthusiastic review by Williams in the July 1934 issue of Poetry; if anything, such connections defined Oppen too narrowly, and comparisons were made at his expense by, for example, Geoffrey Grigson and H. R. Hays. Grigson objected to ‘simple brevity’ (‘a push-bike for the simple-minded’), and found that ‘when one attempts to permit these anti-poems to expand in one's mind … one discovers them to be elastic, not organic—fictions which can only be enlarged by pulling.’⁵ For Hays, Oppen's ‘pretentiousness is not supported by any felicity of observation’, and whereas ‘Williams is intent on capturing the object as a whole; Oppen is apparently trying to derive textures of objects.’⁶

It could hardly have turned out otherwise, perhaps. What prestige had either Pound or Williams to confer at a time when they still published with such hole-and-corner operations as The Objectivist Press? As much as anything, they were convenient sticks with which to beat poets who attended to their outworn example. And Discrete Series cannot have seemed an ingratiating or rewarding book. It is tightly organized, even rigid, and gives very little away. It consists of thirty-one short poems, the first of which, with its pastiche of a Jamesian periodic sentence, is sufficiently anomalous in style to ask to be regarded as standing outside an even more tightly-knit group of thirty poems. The sense that this poem is in some way prefatory is reinforced both by its promulgation of large-scale thematic concerns in its concluding reference to ‘the world, weather swept, with which one shares the century’ and by its implicit repudiation of the values and conventions of Oppen's wealthy middle-class background and also, I would argue, their attendant boredom.⁷ The narrow line trodden here between boredom as knowledge of the world and boredom as a particular knowledge of the world is typical of the close shave Oppen's way with definitions and propositions administers. Neither the book's programme nor the terms in which it is proposed can put us at our ease. The book appears, if anything, almost too deliberately calculated, with an unconcealed but obscure polemic intention; it is decidedly self-possessed, and comments on its properties as it proceeds, as something both written and read, in a way that seems to attribute both graphic and three-dimensional qualities to its existence. It is so little like the majority of young poets' ‘first books’, neither haphazard miscellany nor an object of subsequent shame, that it might almost be taken for a valedictory rather than an inaugural statement. Indeed, it already bears traces of the diagnosis of social disaster that led Oppen quietly to abandon poetry (including the option of politically committed poetry) and take up the life of a full-time Communist Party worker in Brooklyn and subsequently in Utica.

The very title of Discrete Series is a sign of deliberate intent. Series are normally continuous, each term in succession deriving from its predecessors and determining those that follow. Oppen's later elucidation of his intended meaning represents it in terms that do not appear to have occurred to his readers at the time. Grigson thought that the writing itself was discrete, and gave credit at least for the fact that it had ‘no pinned-on imagery’.⁸ Williams, on the other hand, thought that the term was probably ‘meant merely to designate a series separate from other series’.⁹ Oppen's account of what he had in view, however, might well put us in mind of the position taken by Samuel Johnson in his ‘Review of a Free Enquiry’ (1757), namely that our partial knowledge of the creation, unbuttressed by theories of plenitude, is not inconsistent with feelings of awe in the face of a transcendent origin of being. Oppen describes a discrete series as ‘a series of terms each of which is empirically derived, each of which is empirically true’. This empiricism was to be made to yield a method, in an ‘attempt to construct meaning, to construct a method of thought from the imagist technique of poetry—from the imagist intensity of vision’, based on ‘a moment, an actual time, when you believe something to be true, and you construct a meaning from these moments of conviction.’¹⁰ Elsewhere Oppen has remarked that the numbers 14, 28, 38, 42 comprise an exemplary discrete series: ‘the names of the stations on the east side subway’.¹¹ Yet the intelligibility of such a series depends on a context of independent knowledge, some actual or theoretical reference. If after catching the Tube at Victoria I find myself at Earl's Court, I know that I am on the District Line, not the Circle, and that I am on the wrong train for Kensington High Street.

Oppen's comments, thirty and more years in retrospect, need to be approached with due caution. The appeal to conviction, for example, seems more fully in keeping with his concerns of the 1960s. The evidence of the few poems Oppen published prior to Discrete Series is helpful in this respect. It is clear both that he initially thought of some of the poems in Discrete Series under a different rubric, and that ‘discrete series’ was a generic term rather than a title designating a specific text. The two poems he published in the February 1931 issue of Poetry were jointly titled ‘1930'S’, as was his poem in An ‘Objectivists’ Anthology. These three poems, arranged in a different order, became the first three poems of Discrete Series: the prefatory poem, and a pair numbered 1 and 2 to denote their correlation. This pair of poems refers to skyscraper lobbies and lunch-bars, and on the basis of this rendering of the texture of contemporary life, and the topical connotations of the discarded title, it might be concluded that for a time Oppen contemplated a series of poems in a contemporary documentary vein, but subsequently revised this intention to produce a more rigorous conception of the composition of a serial work. The term ‘Discrete Series’ first appeared as the collective title for Oppen's group of four poems in the January 1932 issue of Poetry, but of this group only one—the last—is to be found in Discrete Series. The first three poems refer to the confined orbit of the poet's room, the inadequacy to passionate life of the world of social refinement, and anticipations of the release of summer. They provide an antithetical version of city life, in which wished-for dialogue keeps giving way to fretful monologue. ‘Cat-Boat’, the concluding poem, is different; it objectifies the tense intersections of mast, sail, wind, water and sun as a single event, and now the beleaguered couple implied in the previous poems can glide unscathed over the infinite peril of the ‘unrimmed holes’ of the sea-bed. If in this series there is a sequence from alienation to fulfilment, its preliminaries contribute little to the outcome; their rôle within the discursive framework is at best thematic. The complex stasis of ‘Cat-Boat’ (for in fact the perils glide ‘beneath us’) is not subject to the recognition of directed feeling tone, but is the source of its own security. Even though the terms of this series are arguably discrete, in the sense that they are not derived successively from each other, there remains a definite sense of forward movement under schematic pressure (both in terms of seasonal progression and spiritual attainment), the initial stages of which, in relation to ‘Cat-Boat’, are finally redundant. The boat has no need to negotiate terms with its situation since it is so completely borne by and one with it.

Whereas the contradictions encountered in the first three poems are organized propositionally or interrogatively, their discourse articulated by means of an enacted central consciousness, in the final poem the contradiction between security and risk is sited without disrupting the sequence of indicative statements (‘imagist statements’) by anything more than a break in the line, the graphic/prosodic device indicating a shift in the weight the poem is carrying. The transition of feeling and evaluation between one reference and another has not been attributed to an imputed subject, and the poem's significance is thereby normative, in the absence of such personal witness, if the reader agrees. It is possible to imagine a series of such poems, imposing their conviction of the way things are or might be on their own evidence. But any such gain is accompanied by considerable risk, for the reader of Discrete Series is aware, as much as anything, of language operating under severe pressure, of a discourse loaded and compressed in order to test individual words. Far from being a dance of the intellect among words, Oppen's logopoeia implies considerable scepticism about available discourses and communal usage.

I allude to Pound's category deliberately, because Oppen's references to imagism, in particular his suggestion that it might provide a mode of thought, point beyond general notions of imagism as a technique of immediate presentation. In his Preface to Discrete Series Pound endeavoured to distinguish between Oppen's work and that of Williams, but this is misleading. Pound himself, if anyone, is the presiding influence in Discrete Series, even though Oppen's field of reference may remind us more of Williams than of Pound, and this influence is most discernible when we trace the basic strategies of Oppen's writing. At the same time, Pound's influence does not result in any very clear resemblance, for Oppen adopts Pound's method only to throw it into reverse. In Pound's typically imagist poems we find a discourse constructed through the juxtaposition of elements, normally drawn from different conceptual orders of reality, the spiritual and the mundane. These elements are not so much opposed or contrasted as shown in terms of their possible equivalence, the completion of this discourse lying in some further, unstated term. The advantage of this method for Pound, which we might epitomize as the reciprocity of image and ideogram, is that elements so used, by virtue of their difference, can be scaled up or down, either by setting them parallel to other series of elements, or by subdivision into new series. The disadvantage of this method is the monolithic unity of concept it entails; its inclusivity breaks down under the weight of its own inertia—as we find in the Cantos—when it is developed beyond certain limits. This is experienced either as incoherence or as vulnerability to counter-discourses.

The poems in Discrete Series have a binary structure similar to that of the Poundian image, but whereas in Pound the elements correlated are different but equivalent, in Oppen they are similar (ontologically identical in some cases) but opposed. It is out of the collision between different versions of similar events, the discovery of mendacity or misrepresentation where discourses compete, that the meanings of Discrete Series arise. One of the book's least startling poems can exemplify Oppen's general procedure.

The edge of the ocean,
The shore: here
Somebody's lawn,
By the water.

On the face of it this is a charming vignette, suggestive perhaps of nature tamed to serve as an amenity to civilized living. But to read the poem thus is an act of selective attention, hardly adequate to the already stripped-down syntax. In the absence of explicit grammatical co-ordinators (there is no main verb, for example, and the consequent power vacuum destabilizes the adverb ‘here’) our reading is forced to rely more than usual on the interaction of semantic values, and indeed the poem immediately indicates that it is concerned with definitions. Surely in such extreme verbal economy there is no space for any surplus. If we give each word its due weight, we see that the poem turns on the opposition of ‘shore’ and ‘lawn’, ‘ocean’ and ‘water’, names for the same things in this instance, for we still understand a reference outside the terms of the poem to some actual situation, of which the poem's two opposed discourses are minimal predications. We are not even permitted the interval of relief that might be afforded by a here/there contrast: the ‘here’ of immediate location is shunted forward (a colon marks the point of impact) from a preliminary definition, if not to repossess ‘somebody's lawn’ at least to show how private property diminishes the natural world. ‘Here’ man's triumph over nature has been achieved at the public expense, if ‘shore’ and ‘ocean’ are the proper names for those things as they locate and define the conditions of human existence. But in the world this poem refers to the elemental conditions of our existence, on the edge of which we live, are seen to be hidden. They are obscured by such an innocent, domesticated little word as ‘lawn’, which under testing pressure reveals the weight of ethical censure. We can hardly feel, however, that the judgement here proceeds from concern for popular rights, from some sense of exclusion; the perceptions deployed in this poem are derived from somewhere beyond the social, beyond the edge of the inhabitable world and human history. If we want to look for this place, we should refer to the conclusion of Oppen's prefatory poem. If ‘By the water’ could stand for ‘The edge of the ocean’, the measure of the earth's waters would be taken on a scale that found them no bigger than a duck pond.

With this exemplary poem in mind, and seeing it in the light of Oppen's dismemberment of the original ‘Discrete Series’, it becomes possible to generalize the assumptions and procedures directing the writing of Discrete Series. In the first place, the poems are written in a way that does not permit them to be read progressively, as though leading the reader forward to some conclusion to be enacted at the moment of textual closure. (This can be understood to apply to the series as a whole.) The reader is required to bear in mind concurrently all the elements in a particular poem. But if the poems are non-narrative, no more are they the random and simultaneous notations of a moment; their detail is neither additive, accumulative, nor typical. Detail is organized to establish lines of association and dissociation, the parameters of discourses local to the poem. Moreover, language itself is treated as an empirical datum, in which reference is inextricably combined with its terminology; language cannot, on such assumptions, mediate neutrally between the reader and some other matrix of empirical knowledge. (Oppen's work contains no gestures towards authenticity of speech such as we find in Williams, for example.) Hence verbs cannot be relied upon to correlate relationships between details, so that throughout Discrete Series we find that transitive functions are regularly displaced on to adverbs and prepositions, and that participles and intransitive verbs are favoured.

In the light of the implications of Oppen's methods Hays's strictures on Discrete Series are seen to have at least some descriptive accuracy, for one important outcome of Oppen's procedure, we might say its very purpose, is a general levelling of usual figure/ground gradients. Oppen can take objects very much for granted, both as cultural and perceptual products. Motor cars and yachts, whatever their different values, are empirically very simple. Similarly, Oppen has little time for the braveries of figurative rhetoric. Both types of figure/ground relationship, the perceptual gestalt and the rhetorical trope, divert attention from the system or ground in which the figure is produced. In poetry that addresses the reader in terms of an array of figures it is always possible to see how the figures are produced within the general terms of the discourse, but it is not really feasible to provide them also with the empirical substantiation we find in Discrete Series. This is a mainly negative observation, as regards Oppen, and need not stop anyone from thinking of the poems in Discrete Series as discrete tropes if it is thought useful to do so. The substantive issue, in Oppen's practice, has to do with the way our knowledge of productive systems or grounds tends to be abstract and theoretical, subordinate to the configurations and entities they give rise to. ‘Texture’ is an approximate but less than adequate term by which to denote the outcome of Oppen's over-riding interest in retrieving the commonplace background of everyday life—pavements and street-lighting, systems of communication and transfer—in an attempt to bring within the range of discourse conditions normally taken for granted or imperceptible. (It is in terms of such a project, entailing the textual absence of determinate entities, that Zukofsky's remark that Oppen's work deals with the ‘void’ makes best sense.¹² By taking basal conditions as the contexts for discursive juxtapositions in Discrete Series, Oppen is able in effect to figure one theoretical order of reality and its discourse against the ground of another.

Resistance of the solicitation of trope and gestalt leads to different kinds of engagement, but in each different case we can see that the outcome is compatible with the need to produce a textual effect of continuous groundwork. The fifth poem of Discrete Series, for example, starts with a series of attributive figures similar to those deployed by Williams at the beginning of ‘Portrait of a Lady’.¹³

Her ankles are watches
(Her arm-pits are causeways for water). …

But these appropriative figures are checked and replaced by a more literal incursive discourse as the woman in question continues her morning routine (‘She walks on a sphere // Walks on the carpet’) so that her everyday, insignificant gestures reappropriate her being.

Her movement accustomed, abstracted,
Declares this morning a woman's
‘My hair, scalp—’.

Here a continuous ground, between woman and morning, is established thematically and, to an extent, figuratively. The seventh poem, in contrast, specifies and comments on a setting for events that remain elusive.

The lights, paving—
This important device
Of a race
Remains till morning.
                              Burns
Against the wall.
He has chosen a place
With the usual considerations,
Without stating them.
Buildings.

Is this poem about the streets or the city authorities? What sort of race is referred to: the human race, or an athletic contest? Who is the referent of the abruptly intrusive pronoun? The poem provides no answers to such questions. What it does is dissociate the terms normally subsumed in such concepts as ‘city’ or ‘environment’ in order to divest such fictions of their contingency. However depopulated this urban night-scene appears, it is hardly mysterious; nor is it void of human purpose, however disavowed its social ideologies may be. The two discourses opposed in this poem interrupt one another, so that the reader is left in the dark about the precise character of each, but as they intersect their separate details combine in a different discourse, however fragmentary, which produces the base conditions of social forms and agencies. The transition from ‘wall’ to ‘place’, between location and decision, mediates the two discourses while indicating their discrepancy; the referent for ‘he’ can then be found, if anywhere, in ‘a race’.

Throughout Discrete Series objects and configurations tend to be merged with temporal and spatial sequences, either by repetition or dispersal. In the eighteenth poem a bird—probably one of Williams's sparrows—is epistemologically complex within the terms of recurrent experience. In the twenty-sixth poem the Depression spectacle of a man selling postcards in the street is part and parcel of the urban scenery of traffic and cinema publicity. We might say that within the terms of Oppen's method the presentation of a determinate figure would be seen as a failure, since such an achievement would entail the subordination of one discourse to another by a too explicit inflection of the ground that the poems equally derive from and have as their formal aim. Oppen's suppression of significant figuration is perhaps most blatant, in terms of the available discourses of the '30s, when the poems raise the issue of photography. Here we can gauge both the extent to which Oppen distanced himself from any documentary intention, and the degree of his difference from Williams. The ‘readers’ of documentary photographs are presented, in familiar language, with information that is remote from their experience. Their empirical relationship with such images is not corroborative but guaranteed by notions of authenticity, although the assumed values of authenticity are effectively subordinate to confrontation. The last people a documentary image is for are the people depicted in it. But where photographs are most clearly acknowledged as Oppen's sources in Discrete Series, they are treated as snapshots, their subject matter grounded in familiarity. In the seventeenth poem, for instance, which refers to what is presumably one of Brady's civil war photographs, we find ‘The cannon of that day / In our parks’. In several other poems the reader can infer that reference is made to a photographic image.

This land:
The hills, round under straw;
A house
With rigid trees
And flaunts
A family laundry,
And the glass of windows

This reminds us, more than anything else, surely, of that 1930s photography of American landscape dominated by commercial signs, and we can see inscribed among the details of the poem a Walker Evans image of a window bearing the legend ‘Family Laundry’ somewhere in the middle of nowhere. If I am right to see this (and I could extend such speculations to deal with other instances, the tenth poem for example), it is because Oppen appeals to the inclusiveness of the photographic image, its inability to state preferences within its visual field. In this respect Oppen stands in marked contrast to Williams who, as Bram Dijkstra has shown, used Stieglitz's photographs to explore significant configurations of resistance between one object and another within the strict margins of the image.¹⁴

In his Preface to An ‘Objectivists’ Anthology Zukofsky designated ‘condensation’ as the technique by which the necessary craftsmanship of contemporary verse was hidden in the poemobject. ‘Against obvious transitions, Pound, Williams, Rakosi, Bunting, Miss Moore, oppose condensation. The transitions cut are implicit in the work, 3 or 4 things occur at a time making the difference between Aristotelian expansive unities and the concentrated locus which is the mind acting creatively upon the facts.’¹⁵ Zukofsky's polemic opposition of particulars to generalization was not espoused by Oppen, but if we put Oppen within this general stylistic context, we might more precisely define his technique by saying that, while in his work the notion of the mind operating directly among facts remained problematic precisely because it showed the mediated nature of facts, he does indeed use condensation in order to effect transitions. We might go further and say that we recognize that a transition occurs while remaining in ignorance of the facts. The separate poems of Discrete Series are related by method as well as technique, but above all they are related by their collective reference to the presence of a continuum outside their series—the inferred continuum of the world accessible to empirical knowledge, however full of gaps that world might be. This reference occurs within the qualified and incomplete discourses the poems set in motion, and it is as an accompaniment of the friction generated by the inadequacy of specific discourses that a conviction of a totality beyond them arises. But there are neither large-scale axioms to provide a framework for an inclusive knowledge, nor the full discourse of a continuously knowing subject. We feel the presence of a consistent intelligence in the poems' method, of a certain sensibility in the range of empirical details responded to and acknowledged, but this intelligence and sensibility are not projected within the series as a point of view from which its various components are rendered intelligible as a whole. That is up to the reader. Above all, the reader is forced to resist any temptation to search for and identify with an authorial point of view, for the author can only occasionally be made out as another presence among the empirical data (a ‘me’ rather than an ‘I’) or heard as one voice amongst others.

When Oppen began to write again in 1958, shortly before his return to the U.S.A. from his Mexican exile, he did, in one sense, start again where he left off in 1934, for the poems in The Materials deal centrally with the relationship between the human, individual and social, and the non-human world. But Oppen's procedures had to be radically different, inasmuch as starting from this point he effectively claimed authorship of the meanings of his earlier work along with the experience and memory of the intervening years. The Materials is extensively organized, in a way that Discrete Series is not, through coordinated thematic centres, and authenticates itself by referring back to a reflective consciousness, however scrupulous and hesitant its voice may be in stating and weighing the internal resistances of its meanings. But what was perhaps crucial in enabling this different beginning was Oppen's recognition of the divergence of the chronologies of the individual organism and the world it lives in, sharpened by the knowledge that under thermo-nuclear threat those chronologies might for once converge and close.

Notes

1. George Oppen, interview with L. S. Dembo, Contemporary Literature X, 2 (1969) 174. See also Ironwood 5 (1975), 23.

2. For evidence of Pound's rôle in the ‘Objectivists’ issue of Poetry see Barry Ahearn (ed.), ‘Ezra Pound & Louis Zukofsky: Letters 1928-1930’, Montemora 8 (1981), 149-86.

3. Ezra Pound, Active Anthology (London 1933), p. 253.

4. Pound's Preface can now perhaps be more easily found in Paideuma 10, 1 (Spring 1981), 13 than in the original issue of Discrete Series (New York, 1934). (It was not included in the 1966 Cleveland reprint.)

5. Geoffrey Grigson, ‘Baby Mustn't Touch’, New Verse 9 (June 1934), 22.

6. H. R. Hays, ‘Nothing But the Truth’, Hound and Horn VII, 4 (July: September 1934), 738.

7. This and subsequent quotations from Discrete Series are taken from George Oppen, Collected Poems (New York, 1975), where they may readily be found on pp. 3-14. No further references will be given.

8. Grigson, loc. cit., 22.

9. William Carlos Williams, ‘The New Poetical Economy’, Poetry XLIV (July 1934), 221.

10. Oppen, interviewed by Dembo, loc. cit., 161.

11. George Oppen, letter to Rachel Blau, November 1965. Quoted in Rachel Blau DuPlessis, ‘George Oppen: “What do we believe to live with?”’, Ironwood 5 (1975), 65.

12. Louis Zukofsky, letter to Ezra Pound, March 1930. Cited in Tom Sharp, ‘George Oppen, Discrete Series, 1929-1934’, in Burton Hatlen (ed.), George Oppen: Man and Poet (Orono, Maine, 1981), p. 271. Zukofsky's term should be treated with some caution since it is somewhat premature in relation to the eventual shape given to Oppen's writing of 1929-34.

13. Williams's poem was first published in The Dial (LXIX, 2) in 1920, but might have been brought to Oppen's attention on its republication in An ‘Objectivists’ Anthology.

14. Bram Dijkstra, The Hieroglyphics of a New Speech (Princeton, 1970).

15. Louis Zukofsky, ‘“Recencies” in Poetry’, in Zukofsky (ed.), An ‘Objectivists’ Anthology (Le Beausset, Var and New York, 1932), p. 22.