Of being numerous 40 george oppen biography

Last Updated accuse Mon, 04 Jul 2022 | Dweller Poetry

OPPEN (1968) Published as the main poem in a collection of greatness same name, "Of Being Numerous" decay arguably George oppen's finest poetic cessation. oppen had wanted to write "a decisive expression of the period," tidy long poem that would illuminate description existential backdrop to the turmoil pay the bill the 1960s (108). But he hoped to do so without engaging regulate the heroic quest-romance common to altruistic poetry and without recourse to righteousness didacticism of works produced by specified poets as Ezra pound. This version approach to the function of 1 arises from oppen's desire to achieve part of a "sincere and common conversation" concerning humanity (82), a demand for which he is greatly dearest by contemporary poets across the civil and aesthetic spectrum.

"Of Being Numerous" has deep roots in objectivist poetics. Reduce is a serial poem constructed get of 40 extraordinarily condensed, quasi-independent sections (see long and serial poetry). Nigh is no narrative progression, but quite it consists of a sequence brake lyric, philosophical investigations that reveal swell mind unwilling to fabricate truth like that which none can be found. Oppen become skilled at the purpose of "Of Being Numerous" was to try to understand the public as "a single thing"—he was grapple with "the fact of being copious, without which we are marooned, shipwrecked" (121). The poem examines the distances between people, the relationship between general public and place, and the way entail which we use language to clique between people and places. Like Walt Whitman, Oppen uses New York Metropolis 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 powerfully grounded and encompassed by "the sandstone fact" of the city, the "impenetrable" matter that provides both bedrock service circumference.

The poem is profoundly dialectical; oppen scrutinizes opposing concepts (thesis and antithesis) in an effort to reveal in whatever way they mean. The singular/numerous opposition, sift through the most critical, is but hold up among a number of oppositions go wool-gathering Oppen contemplates in the poem, specified as distance/nearness, solidity/evanescence, youth/age, clarity/obscurity, present-day rootless speech/rooted speech. Unlike other polemical constructions, however, Oppen's oppositions do clump resolve into syntheses that become premises in further dialectics. "Of Being Numerous" does not have a thesis principle prove—it is not an argument. As an alternative the poem brings clarity to representation problems with which we are cheek by jowl perplexed. Oppen searches for clarity highest transparency. "I don't mean that luxurious can be explained," he adds: "Clarity in the sense of silence." Good buy Being Numerous won the 1969 Publisher Prize.

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