Of Being Ethical: Reflections on George Oppen

The poems of George Oppen continue to occupy a marginal place in most literary histories, even though his work encapsulates some of the major shifts in American writing between high modernism and contemporary Language poetry. In part this marginalization is due to the habit of tying Oppen to Louis Zukofsky's shortlived “Objectivist” tendency of the thirties. Oppen did indeed publish his first collection, Discrete Series, in 1934, and with a strong endorsement from Ezra Pound (“I salute a serious craftsman, a sensibility which is not every man's sensibility and which has not been got out of any other man's books”). Yet after this propitious start Oppen fell silent for twenty-five years, jettisoning poetry for politics. He and his wife Mary were members of the Communist Party between 1936 and 1941, their activities eventually attracting close scrutiny from the FBI. In 1949, Oppen and his family opted for political exile in Mexico to avoid harrassment. They would not return until 1958; only then did Oppen begin writing poetry again, initiating a sequence of major volumes, from The Materials (1962) to Primitive (1978).