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PAUL ZWEIG
William Carlos Williams, yet his work was virtually unknown, even
among poets. The fashions came and went. Proletarian poetry in the
1930s and 40s; bland rhetorical poetry in the 1950s; imagist surreal
poetry in the 1960s. At long intervals, Oppen published volumes of
difficult, tightly written poems: four volumes in thirty years. Not a
prolific writer, not a representative of familiar fashions or schools.
Even the free-wheeling tastes of the 1960s seemed not to affect
George Oppen's isolation. Then in 1969, to the general surprise,
George Oppen's newest volume,
Of Being Numerous,
was awarded
the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, a tribute not to one book but to a life–
time of achievement in poetry.
Oppen is not an easy poet to read. His poems are tightly
wrought meditations which do not so much define as surround their
subject with tentative thrusts of meaning. Abstractions and carefully
observed details mingle to produce a line that is almost sculptural
in its precision:
. is it not
In fear the roots grip
Downward
And beget
The baffling hierarchies
Of father and child
As of leaves on their high
Thin twigs to shield us
From time, from open
Time
- "Of Being Numerous"
Oppen's short open stanzas are reminiscent of William Carlos
WH–
Iiams. The words are exposed by their simplicity, so that Oppen's
image of "baffling hierarchies" transfixes us with beautiful surprise.
The idea that birth-giving defends against the fear of time, that fear
plunging like a root nourishes the delicacy of leaves, is expressed with
the utter reserve of words adequate to their meaning.
Most of Oppen's recent book is devoted to a long meditative
poem in forty parts, entitled "Of Being Numerous." It contains some
of the finest poetry Oppen has written, and presents a difficult chal–
lenge to the reader, for the poem proceeds by side leaps and deft
