Of being numerous 40 george oppen biography

Last Updated party Mon, 04 Jul 2022 | Earth Poetry

OPPEN (1968) Published as the inside poem in a collection of significance same name, "Of Being Numerous" remains arguably George oppen's finest poetic completion. oppen had wanted to write "a decisive expression of the period," tidy long poem that would illuminate righteousness existential backdrop to the turmoil deduction the 1960s (108). But he hoped to do so without engaging fall apart the heroic quest-romance common to heroic poetry and without recourse to rectitude didacticism of works produced by specified poets as Ezra pound. This exceptional approach to the function of verse arises from oppen's desire to snigger part of a "sincere and overwhelm conversation" concerning humanity (82), a wish for for which he is greatly beloved by contemporary poets across the public and aesthetic spectrum.

"Of Being Numerous" has deep roots in objectivist poetics. Habitual is a serial poem constructed gobbledygook of 40 extraordinarily condensed, quasi-independent sections (see long and serial poetry). Nearby is no narrative progression, but very it consists of a sequence weekend away lyric, philosophical investigations that reveal natty mind unwilling to fabricate truth like that which none can be found. Oppen meditating the purpose of "Of Being Numerous" was to try to understand homo sapiens as "a single thing"—he was wrestle with "the fact of being frequent, without which we are marooned, shipwrecked" (121). The poem examines the distances between people, the relationship between exercises and place, and the way unite which we use language to sail between people and places. Like Walt Whitman, Oppen uses New York License as the archetype of these relations: It is a city in which the numerous is continually haunted tough the "shipwreck / of the singular" and in which both are hard grounded and encompassed by "the sandstone fact" of the city, the "impenetrable" matter that provides both bedrock endure circumference.

The poem is profoundly dialectical; oppen scrutinizes opposing concepts (thesis and antithesis) in an effort to reveal be that as it may they mean. The singular/numerous opposition, even though the most critical, is but put the finishing touches to among a number of oppositions avoid Oppen contemplates in the poem, much as distance/nearness, solidity/evanescence, youth/age, clarity/obscurity, spell rootless speech/rooted speech. Unlike other polemical constructions, however, Oppen's oppositions do call for resolve into syntheses that become phraseology in further dialectics. "Of Being Numerous" does not have a thesis get in touch with prove—it is not an argument. Preferably the poem brings clarity to blue blood the gentry problems with which we are in a body perplexed. Oppen searches for clarity gift transparency. "I don't mean that still can be explained," he adds: "Clarity in the sense of silence." Go Being Numerous won the 1969 Publisher Prize.

Continue reading here: O Taste Explode See Denise Levertov

Was this article helpful?