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And the discovery of fact bursts
In a paroxism of emotion
Now as always. Crusoe
We say was
"Rescued."
So we have chosen.
PAUL ZWEIG
- "Of Being Numerous"
Oppen suggests that Crusoe's shipwreck was a victory. That we have
comforted ourselves by declaring him "rescued." Shipwreck may be
a disaster, but, in Oppen's words, it creates a "bright light." Crusoe
is a hero in loneliness, not in rescue. Crusoe, for Oppen, is the per–
ceiver and the poet who knows that strong experience requires sep–
arateness, that seeing isolates:
"Whether, as the intensity of seeing increases, one's distance
from Them, the people, does not also increase"
I know, of course, I know, I can enter no other place
Yet I am one of those who from nothing but man's way of
thought and one of his diale cts and what has happened
to me
Have made poetry
To dream of that beach
For the sake of an instant in tlte eyes,
The absolute singular
The unearthly bonds
Of the singular
Which is the bright light of shipwreck
- "Of Being Numerous"
"Being Numerous," represents Whitman's hope, but also the deadness
of brutal lives and frayed selves. Poetry is the language of identity.
It results from Crusoe's disaster, which we have never understood as
a mode of urban heroism.
These remarks are far from exhaustive. "Of Being Numerous,"
L'5 a complex poem, which requires the sort of exploratory reading
and rereading that Wallace Stevens's and T. S. Eliot's poetry de–
manded. Ideas are presented not only to be understood, but to be ex–
perienced suggestively, musically, so to speak.
It
is, I think, Oppen's
major achievement to date, and one of the most important single
poems to be written in recent years.
