PARTISAN REVIEW
275
as'30ClatlOns. Single words are caught up from a preceding stanza,
and expanded into a constellation of images. Sharply evoked city–
scapes issue into elusive statements of feeling or philosophy. The
movement of the poem suggests the rigor of musical form, although
I am not sure the structure of the poem as a whole is as strict as my
comparison makes
it
seem.
"Of Being Numerous," is essentially a meditation on the city.
It explores the perpetual newness and sameness of lives along side–
walks, in tenements. Above all, it describes the challenge to the singu–
lar self, presented by the "many," huddled together through sheer
number. Oppen explores the precariousness of the solitary mind, its
"shipwreck" in the massed movements of the urban world:
Obsessed, bewildered
By
the shipwreck
Of the singular
We have chosen the meaning
Of being numerous.
The poem moves between two shadowy figures who organize its
themes: Kierkegaard, the lonely street-wanderer, who dramatized
the "shipwreck" of the singular self; Walt Whitman, that other
street-wanderer, whose self became a community of all the selves, a
transparent city of the spirit. These two figures are the limits within
which the poem's meditations probe and develop. The whole of stanza
sixteen
is
a quote from Kierkegaard, while the final stanza is a prose
quote from Whitman, the two representing opposite illuminations:
one the illumination of loneliness, what Oppen calls "the bright light
of shipwreck," and the other the illumination of community, the
sunlit oneness of buildings. It is interesting that neither limiting state–
ment is in Oppen's words. Statement lies outside the delicate struc–
ture of Oppen's style. Statement is a boundary line, a landmark. The
poem itself has the elusiveness of growth and pure movement.
Another figure stands closer to the center of Oppen's medi–
tation:
We are pressed, pressed on erilCh other,
We will be told at once
Of anything that happens
