In 1963, June Oppen Degnan attempted to interest her brother in Jungian psychology. Although George Oppen found Jung's character compelling, he dismissed the Jungian system, calling it finally “muddy, so lazy minded” (“Letters” 224). In his rejection of Jung, Oppen opposed himself to the philosophical basis for the “deep image” poetry exemplified by Robert Bly and James Wright, one of the most formidable poetic movements of the 1960s.

The differences in poetics between Oppen and the deep imagists are fundamental because Oppen departed from Jung at the most fundamental level:

There seems to me in Jung a degree of mystery hunting of which the result, if not the purpose, is the avoidance of the rather awesome and mineral mystery. If we started with the existence of the universe, and man finding himself confronted by it, I think then we would be somewhere near the root of myth … and of the incredible effort of the psyche to interpret and to understand. … But to make the psyche the very heart of the mystery makes possible the use of words and concepts which are almost nursery-words: heroes and stories, flying men and princes, as the heart of the mystery. I think these are parts of the culture built by men facing the inexplicable universe. And that we can understand them, and must understand them, because we live—insofar as we are human—in history.

(Selected Letters 91-92)

Furthermore, Oppen found that the ideas which he opposed to Jung were integral to his own poetics, as he told Degnan: “I pursue my difference. The poems are full of it, almost nothing else” (“Letters” 223). The difference between Oppen's poetics and the aesthetics of the deep imagists is visible on the surface level of his most famous single poem, “Of Being Numerous,” in its approaches to intertextuality, closure, and metaphor. These surface differences, in turn, reveal attitudes toward humanity and the non-human world that are radically different from deep image poetry as I will exemplify it here in Wright's volume The Branch Will Not Break.¹

Both Oppen and the deep imagists begin from an attempt to move the individual human consciousness from the center of the poem. The difference between them lies in what, exactly, they substitute for this individual consciousness. The deep imagists attempted to replace it with a kind of numinous relation between the individual, the Jungian collective unconscious, and the external world. As Jack Myers and Michael Sims note, the term “deep image,” for all its prevalence, has been only loosely defined; but they cite a fairly useful definition from Bly's essay on Francis Ponge:

It is as if the object itself, a stump or an orange, has links with the human psyche, and the unconscious provides material it would not give if asked directly. The unconscious passes into the object and returns. The union of the object with the psyche moves slowly, and the poem may take four or five years to write.

(77)

The most evident philosophical problem with this apparent “method” for writing deep image poetry is that it strongly implies an appropriation of the object by the psyche: here Bly's sexual image of “the unconscious pass[ing] into the object” is revelatory. There is also a pragmatic problem with this “method,” because it says almost nothing about the last stage of the process, in which the union of the unconscious and the object must be made conscious through language and situated in the poetic line. It is very possible that Bly neglects this step in the process because, as do many of the deep imagists, he takes language as being largely transparent. It is this assumption which allows the deep imagists to subsume questions of language beneath metaphysical speculations, thus justifying Oppen's fairly pointed reference to their “belief that Somebody Up There Speaks English” (Selected Letters 78).

Oppen's method of decentering the individual ego involves, instead of an appropriation of the external world by the internal, an equal valuing of both worlds. This is fairly explicit in the beginning of “Of Being Numerous,” in which the poet cites Maritain's Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry: “There are things / We live among ‘and to see them / Is to know ourselves.’” The relation between external and internal is made more complex by the fact that Oppen defines the external world not only in terms of objects, as the deep imagists tend to do, but gives great weight to the other subjects, the other human consciousnesses exterior to himself. Along these lines we might note Oppen's use of the first person plural, which persists throughout the poem, while the word “I” is prominent only in Sections 9, 10, 14, and 29.

But Oppen's interest in other subjects makes its presence known most obviously in his persistent citations of other writers, in his intertextuality. Certainly some of the heteroglossia of Oppen's poetics is due to the fact of his profound partnership with his wife Mary. In fact Of Being Numerous and the Collected Poems share an identical dedication: “For Mary // whose words in this book are entangled / inextricably with my own.” Yet it would be a mistake to attribute all Oppen's use of intertextuality to his biography. Unlike the many poets and critics of his time who thought of the poem as an autonomous statement, Oppen was deeply aware of the fact that “Mankind is a conversation” (“Daybook” 5). Therefore, “Of Being Numerous” contains either direct quotations or paraphrases of Mary Oppen, Robert S. Brimbaugh, Williams, Chardin, Augustine, Kierkegaard, Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Whitehead, among others. As Burton Hatlen has noticed, the fact that Oppen uses single quotation marks when he brings other texts into the poem seems to support the possibility that the intertexts are quotations within a quotation—“as if the entire poem were perhaps a quotation” (267). We might also remind ourselves here of the fact that Oppen literally allows Walt Whitman to have the last word in the poem.

Wright's conscious use of intertexts is significantly sparser than Oppen's; in fact, there are no quotation marks in the body of any of the poems in The Branch Will Not Break except for “Two Poems About President Harding.”² Although Wright does include a partial translation of a Goethe poem and several epigraphs, these can be seen more accurately as pretexts for poems than as Wright's opening his poetry to other voices. A setting of almost religious silence is made explicit in many of the poems, and seems implicit in others. The only words which break this silence are those of the poet himself, which may account for the fact that so many of Wright's poems have to do, in one way or another, with loneliness.

Just as Oppen allows prior voices into “Of Being Numerous” through conscious intertextuality, he allows the reader a high level of autonomy by resisting closure. As Sharon Olds says, “many questions in his work are left questions” (74); that is, left to the reader. Again, the most dramatic evidence of Oppen's rhetorical choice lies in the poem's ending—in the middle of the Whitman quotation—but Oppen has implanted the idea that closure is not only undesirable but impossible at the poem's outset. Each incident in the poem must be seen as an “Occurrence, a part / of an infinite series.” On a smaller scale, his renunciation of closure can be seen in the radical enjambment of so many of his lines, and in the fact that only twenty-two of the poem's forty sections end with a period. Also, a lack of closure seems to be implied by the poem's visual appearance, in which, as Edward Hirsch has it, “each phrase [is] blocked and weighed, questioned, often isolated on the page” (178).

Furthermore, the individual sections of the poem tend not to cohere as autonomous units of meaning. The most dramatic example of this occurs in Sections 13 and 14, the first of which develops as an antithesis to the view of primitive humanity that Oppen examines in Section 12. Section 13 begins:

                              unable to begin
At the beginning, the fortunate
Find everything already here. They are shoppers,
Choosers, judges; … And here the brutal
is without issue, a dead end.

(18)

The lack of capitalization in the first word of the section, and the fact that it is not flush with the left margin of the page, shows that Oppen himself does not begin this section at the beginning; the beginning has already taken place. Conversely, the ending of Section 13 may seem terminal in its punctuation as well as its condemnation of the urban consumers whom Oppen has characterized as “ghosts that endanger // One's soul.” The poet says of these ghosts that “one may honorably keep // His distance / If he can.”

The equivocation of the last line of Section 13 is seemingly enough to deny it closure; but Oppen complicates the situation even further in his next section, describing his World War II comrades from whom he does not want to separate himself. The clear implication here is that, if one chooses to give up the dishonorable members of humanity, one must give up the honorable members as well. Here again, Oppen seems to reach a degree of stasis, even if it is an equivocal one—and again, he makes the situation more complex and ambivalent, returning from his remembrances of war to the urban present in Section 14:

                                                            How talk
Distantly of ‘The People’
Who are that force
Within the walls
Of cities
Wherein their cars
Echo like history
Down walled avenues
In which one cannot speak.

(19)

The question of how one is to talk of “The People”—and even whether one is able to do so—remains open throughout the poem; it is, in fact, the poem's central question. That Oppen should choose to examine such a question, which has been debated throughout history and has yielded nothing approaching a final answer, is in itself indicative of his desire to withhold closure. Furthermore, the unending dialectical movement between possible answers is reified in these two pages of the poem, which Hatlen calls “an eternal loop, simultaneously affirming and questioning the possibility of achieving a sense of purpose through identification with ‘The People’” (291).

The degree of closure in Wright's work is much greater than that in Oppen's, because the poetic of the deep image movement fundamentally demands closure. The importance of the connection between the object and the unconscious demands that the poem come to some sort of epiphany. Here we might think of the number of poems in The Branch Will Not Break which end dramatically, as an animal seems to be answering Wright: “A Message Hidden in an Empty Wine Bottle,” “Depressed By a Book of Bad Poetry,” “Arriving in the Country Again,” “In the Cold House,” “Snowstorm in the Midwest,” “Today I Was Happy.” Wright appears to agree with Robert Kelly's dictum, in “Notes on the Poetry of the Deep Image,” that

Poetry, like dream reality, is the juncture of the experienced with the never-experienced. Like waking reality, it is the fulfilment of the imagined and the unimagined.

(qtd. in Stephanchev, 177)

The word “fulfilment” strongly implies that the poem should be a final, unrenounceable statement. Oppen's view, on the other hand, is closer to that voiced by Whitman in the Preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass:

A great poem is no finish to a man or woman but rather a beginning. Has any one fancied he could sit at last under some due authority and rest satisfied with explanations and realize and be content and full?

(153)

In his practice of intertextuality as well as his resistance of closure, Oppen's attempt is to countervail his “authority” and the deep imagists is to retain theirs.

These opposing attempts prevail in the writers' relations not only to the human world, but also to the world of the object, as can be seen in their different attitudes toward metaphor. Deep image poets are known for the use of striking metaphors; this seems natural not only because of their debt to continental surrealism but also because the poem as a whole can be seen, in the deep image aesthetic, as a metaphor for psychic experience. Accordingly, Wright uses such figures as “terrible / Fable of calcium” for the earth (“Goodbye to the Poetry of Calcium”), a green tree branch for a voice (“Spring Images”), and birds for both the moon and “the moon's young” (“Beginning”). In fact, several poems in The Branch Will Not Break, such as “The Jewel” and “A Dream of Burial,” are nothing more than extended metaphors.

Oppen's approach to metaphor is quite different. Although he does not eschew it entirely, Oppen uses metaphor very selectively. His most obvious uses are in Section 19, where he describes “the casual will” encased in the helicopters over Vietnam as “the fly in the bottle” and repeats his equation of solitude with “the bright light of shipwreck” (22). These metaphors show an unusual degree of what we might call propriety. In the former case, the metaphor seems to be justified by the obvious resemblances between helicopters and flies; in the latter, the figure is taken as much from Defoe as it is original to Oppen. All told, Oppen's metaphors call little attention to themselves (or, rather, to the poet's ability to make metaphor), while Wright's metaphors are by far the most striking feature of his poems.

These differing uses of metaphor are evidence of not just divergent styles, but fundamentally divergent philosophies of art and human agency. Hayden Carruth puts it concisely:

Years ago the Objectivists announced that metaphor and its inevitable outgrowth, the consciously manipulated symbol, are illegitimate because they arrogate to the poet's personal uses certain properties of the object, suppressing others and thus wrenching the object away from its own wholeness and identity.

(129-30)

Therefore, metaphor can be seen as both fundamentally dishonest and as a declaration that the things of the world are ours to do with as we see fit. Although it is impossible to forgo metaphors entirely—because language tends to condense them into words³—it is best, Carruth and the Objectivists agree, to use them in full cognizance of the fact that they are an imposition.

By this standard, the deep-imagist use of metaphor is deeply illegitimate. For example, in “Milkweed” Wright says,

Whatever it was I lost, whatever I wept for
Was a wild, gentle thing, the small dark eyes
Loving me in secret.

(58)

In effect, Wright is appropriating the non-human to explain a human emotion that he is either unable or unwilling to put in human terms. The possibility of animal eyes loving a man seems particularly disturbing when read in conjunction with Section 20 of Oppen's poem and with the poem he (in another example of his persistent use of intertexts) cites in it. The section is the last of three that examine the effects of the Vietnam War, both on the Vietnamese themselves and, at somewhat more length, on the American people. Oppen ends the section by regarding a fairly amorphous mass of “The People,” riders on the New York subway system:

They know
By now as I know
Failure and the guilt
Of failure.
As in Hardy's poem of Christmas
We might half-hope to find the animals
In the sheds of a nation
Kneeling at midnight,
Farm animals,
Draft animals, beasts for slaughter
Because it would mean they have forgiven us,
Or which is the same thing,
That we do not altogether matter.

(23)

The animals that Oppen refers to are, presumably, the water buffaloes of Vietnam rather than the oxen that Hardy speaks of in the poem of the same name. But the crux of Oppen's passage lies in the “half-hope” that he sees in “The Oxen.” Hardy's poem is that of a recusant Christian who still feels an emotional attachment to the beliefs of the Church, and, specifically, to the folk-belief that oxen knelt at midnight on every Christmas Eve in a recapitulation of the Nativity. Hardy's final comment on this belief is as follows:

So fair a fancy few would weave
          In these years! Yet, I feel,
If someone said on Christmas Eve,
          ‘Come; see the oxen kneel
In the lonely barton by yonder coomb
          Our childhood used to know,’
I should go with him in the gloom,
          Hoping it might be so.

(468)

However, Hardy knows that it would not be so, despite his wish to reclaim the beliefs of his childhood. Similarly, Oppen knows that any wish we might have that the animals absolve humanity of its acts against them is hopelessly naive. Wright apparently does not wish to realize this; in his act of attributing love for himself to the “small dark eyes,” he epitomizes the human appropriation of the non-human world.

On the other hand, Oppen explicitly criticizes the appropriative use of metaphor in one of his few prose pieces, “The Mind's Own Place,” saying that

… It is possible to find a metaphor for anything, an analogue: but the image is encountered, not found; it is an account of the poet's perception, of the act of perception; it is a test of sincerity, a test of conviction, the rare poetic quality of truthfulness.

(qtd. in DuPlessis 126)

Anyone who has considered Oppen's stylistics would notice immediately that his usual economy of phrase is lacking here, as if he is somewhat carried away by his feelings about this subject. And, in fact, the use of “image” (which is perceived by the subject) rather than “metaphor” (which is constructed, often arbitrarily, by the subject) is central to his poetic philosophy.

Similarly, “truth” is one of the key words in Oppen's thinking, and truth-telling is the prime attribute of the poetic persona that he constructs. For example, in Section 29 of “Of Being Numerous” he says: “I can tell myself, and I tell myself / only what we all believe / True” (32); he undoubtedly hopes that he is telling his reader as well as himself something that can be taken as a mutually-constructed truth. Accordingly, he quotes Hegel in a much-cited interview with L. S. Dembo: “Disagreement marks where the subject matter ends. It is what the subject-matter is not” (qtd. in Mottram 149). Furthermore, it is Oppen's belief that a regard for truth makes the apparent difficulties of moral choice elementary. He makes this proposition most forcefully in the poem “Route”:

We are brothers, we are brothers?—these things are composed of a moral substance only if they are untrue. If these things are true they are perfectly simple, perfectly impenetrable, those primary elements which can only be named.

(51)

In other words, these “primary elements” are what the poet encounters rather than constructs; indeed they can neither be constructed or deconstructed, because they are “impenetrable.” Oppen also uses this rather surprising word to describe the “unmanageable pantheon” of things that he considers in the second section of “Of Being Numerous”: “… the world, if it is matter, / Is impenetrable” (10). This rather Democritan view of the world, and of truth, is fundamental to Oppen's poetic; it is because of this view that Charles W. Sharpe says, “when he has done, [Oppen] leaves the world intact” (114).

However, this view also subjects Oppen to the charge of essentialism and, in fact, Oppen does sometimes tend toward the usual essentialist desire to proselytize. What counteracts this tendency is, again, Oppen's resistance to closure, his continual questionings and reversals of his own ideas. On a less lofty level, Oppen undercuts his tendency to preach simply by using his characteristic level of diction. As David McAleavey has noted, Oppen's “is one of the few politically motivated poetries … to manage outright condemnation by maintaining a continual and rigorous pressure toward understatement” (392). We can easily warrant McAleavey's viewpoint by reviewing Oppen's poetic statements on the Vietnam War beside the rhetoric of Robert Bly's “Asian Peace Offers Rejected without Publication”: “Men like [Secretary of State Dean] Rusk are not men: / They are bombs waiting to be loaded in a darkened hangar.” Conversely, Oppen begins Section 20 of “Of Being Numerous” by noting of the urban populace that

—They await
War, and the news
Is war
As always
That the juices may flow in them
Tho the juices lie.

(23)

We might note, given Bly's poem, that “the juices” flow in doves as well as hawks, and that politicians and the media are not the only purveyors of bombast. And in fact Bly's rhetoric in “Asian Peace Offers” is a logical reductio of the deep image poetic as a whole. Although Bly, Wright, and their followers were honestly attempting to decenter the individual poetic ego by partaking of a Jungian esthetic, their poems were nonetheless full of “the subversions of ego” that Robert Hass praises Oppen for avoiding: “the desire to charm, the desire to dazzle, the need to have one's suffering seen and acknowledged” (41).

If we see Oppen's essentialist tendencies as perplexing, we should keep in mind that he does, at the very least, present them in a manner that does not attempt to manipulate unduly either his reader or his subject matter. Furthermore, it is clear that even Oppen's occasional oversimplifications are attractive in their essential humanism. Thus, in speaking yet again of the need for poetic truth, Oppen advances a heuristic which is, yet again, explicitly contrary to the beliefs of the deep image writers:

I think of the truth as emerging not in the atmosphere of mystery, but in the brightest light that can be obtained or can be borne: the tremendous pull of truth, the tremendous desire to know and to say [exists] I think … because the truth is all there is; on the other hand, the truth is everything that there is———most terrible, most wonderful, most to be loved in the blazing daylight.

(“Letters” 223)

Oppen's uncompromising belief in this light of truth evokes a final difference between him and the deep imagists, who seem to see better in the dark. It is also the source of the curious combination of modesty, stoicism and tenderness which is the most attractive aspect of his poetic persona, and may explain some of his affinity for Hardy, a seemingly very different poet.

Louise Gluck, another very different poet from Oppen, but one who seems to have taken him as a predecessor, writes that “What Oppen actually rescues for me is the conviction that art is crucial” (237). Although Gluck means, of course, that art is vital, we might also read Oppen's work as proposing that art is a crux, a meeting place—not among the unconscious, the ego, and the external world, as proposed by the deep image movement, but between the numerous others of the world and the artist's continual, deeply human attempt to respond to them.

Notes

1. In using Wright as an example of deep-imagist excess, I do not mean to denigrate his work's many virtues (his deep human sympathy and his brilliant vers libre prosody foremost, for me, among them).

2. The other most prominent deep image book, Bly's Silence in the Snowy Fields, contains no quotation marks except in two epigraphs.

3. An example might be helpful here—Carruth cites “birdsong,” which we generally use in complete unconsciousness of the fact that it is more than a little anthropomorphizing.

Works Cited

Bly, Robert. “Asian Peace Offers Rejected without Publication.” The Light Around the Body. New York: Harper, 1967. 30.

Carruth, Hayden. “Who I am, 3.” Effluences from the Sacred Caves: More Selected Essays and Reviews. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan, 1983. 129-34.

DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. “Objectivist Poetics and Political Vision: A Study of Oppen and Pound.” George Oppen: Man and Poet. Ed. Burton Hatlen. Orono ME: National Poetry Foundation, 1981. 123-48.

Gluck, Louise. “Whole and Not Final: The Art of George Oppen.” Ironwood 13.2 (1985): 237-39.

Hardy, Thomas. “The Oxen.” The Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy. Ed. James Gibson. New York: Macmillan, 1978. 468.

Hass, Robert. “George Oppen: A Tribute.” Ironwood 13.2 (1985): 38-42.

Hatlen, Burton. “Opening Up the Text: George Oppen's ‘Of Being Numerous.’” Ironwood 13.2 (1985): 263-95.

Hirsch, Edward. “‘Out There is the World’: The Visual Imperative in the Poetry of George Oppen and Charles Tomlinson.” George Oppen: Man and Poet. Ed. Burton Hatlen. Orono ME: National Poetry Foundation, 1981. 169-80.

McAleavey, David. “Clarity and Process: Oppen's Of Being Numerous.” George Oppen: Man and Poet. Ed. Burton Hatlen. Orono ME: National Poetry Foundation, 1981. 381-404.

Mottram, Eric. “The Political Responsibilities of the Poet: George Oppen.” George Oppen: Man and Poet. Ed. Burton Hatlen. Orono ME: National Poetry Foundation, 1981. 149-67.

Myers, Jack, and Michael Sims. The Longman Dictionary of Poetic Terms. New York: Longman, 1989.

Olds, Sharon. “George and Mary Oppen: Poetry and Friendship.” Ironwood 13.2 (1985): 73-80.

Oppen, George. “An Adequate Vision: A George Oppen Daybook.” Ironwood 13.2 (1985): 5-31.

———. “Letters to June Oppen Degnan.” Ironwood 13.2 (1985): 215-36.

———. Of Being Numerous. New York: New Directions, 1968.

———. The Selected Letters of George Oppen. Ed. Rachel Blau DuPlessis. Durham: Duke UP, 1990.

Sharpe, Charles H. “George Oppen: The World Intact.” Ironwood 13.2 (1985): 114-15.

Stephanchev, Stephen. American Poetry Since 1945. New York: Harper, 1965.

Whitman, Walt. “Preface to 1855 Edition of Leaves of Grass.” American Poetic Theory. Ed. George Perkins. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1972. 135-56.

Wright, James. The Branch Will Not Break. Middletown CT: Wesleyan UP, 1963.