George Oppen and the Fate of ModernismRegard for George Oppen's poetry has been growing steadily over the last decade. Peter Nicholls's study offers a timely opportunity to engage with a body of work which can be both luminously simple and intriguingly opaque. Nicholls charts Oppen's commitment to Marxism and his later explorations of a 'poetics of being' inspired by Heidegger and Existentialism, providing detailed accounts of each of the poet's books. He is the first critic to draw extensively on the Oppen archive, with its thousands of pages of largely unpublished notes and drafts for poems; in doing so, he is able to map the distinctive contours of Oppen's poetic thinking and to investigate the complex origins of many of his poems. Oppen emerges from this study as a writer of mercurial intensities for whom every poem constitutes a 'beginning again', a freeing of the mind from thoughts known in advance. A strikingly innovative and challenging poetics results from Oppen's attempt to avoid what he regards as the errors of the modernist avant-garde and to create instead a designedly 'impoverished' aesthetic which keeps poetry close to the grain of experience and to the political and ethical dilemmas it constantly poses. |
Contents
Introduction | 1 |
1 Beginning Again | 4 |
2 Materials | 30 |
3 That it is or This in Which | 62 |
Of Being Numerous | 83 |
5 From AvantGarde to Hegel | 110 |
Seascape Needles Eye | 136 |
Myth of the Blaze and Primitive | 162 |
Appendix A | 194 |
Appendix B | 197 |
| 203 | |
| 215 | |
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Common terms and phrases
actually already American appeared argument attempt become beginning Book called close Collected concept concern consciousness course death Discrete Series draft earlier early emphases essay event example existence experience expression fact figure final force George George Oppen gives going Hegel’s Heidegger Heidegger’s human idea important interview Jabès kind knowledge language late later letter light limit lines lives London Marxism Mary material matter meaning metaphysical Mexico mind movement moving nature notes Numerous object observes once Oppen original passage perhaps phrase poem poet poetic poetry political possible Pound present Press published puts question quoted reading recalled reference relation remains remarks seems sense singularity social speak suggests things thinking thought trans translation truth UCSD 16 University University Press writing written wrote York