Description
Book SynopsisRegard for George Oppen''s poetry has been growing steadily over the last decade. Peter Nicholls''s study offers a timely opportunity to engage with a body of work which can be both luminously simple and intriguingly opaque. Nicholls charts Oppen''s commitment to Marxism and his later explorations of a ''poetics of being'' inspired by Heidegger and Existentialism, providing detailed accounts of each of the poet''s books. He is the first critic to draw extensively on the Oppen archive, with its thousands of pages of largely unpublished notes and drafts for poems; in doing so, he is able to map the distinctive contours of Oppen''s poetic thinking and to investigate the complex origins of many of his poems. Oppen emerges from this study as a writer of mercurial intensities for whom every poem constitutes a ''beginning again'', a freeing of the mind from thoughts known in advance. A strikingly innovative and challenging poetics results from Oppen''s attempt to avoid what he regards as the
Trade ReviewReview from previous edition ...an important book...subtly probing book... * Edward Neill MLR *
...a fresh and engaging study of Oppen's work, his life and his relationship with the Objectivist movement...One of the strengths of this book is its extensive use of unpublished materials...It also provides a compelling rereading of Objectivism through Oppen's own continual reassessment of its usefulness as a term. * Emma Kimberly Journal of American Studies *
a thoroughly researched and closely argued account * Jules Smith, Times Literary Supplement *
Table of ContentsIntroduction ; 1. Beginning again ; 2. Materials ; 3. 'That it is', or This In Which ; 4. 'What it is': Of Being Numerous ; 5. From Avant-Garde to Hegel ; 6. A metaphysical edge': Seascape: Needle's Eye ; 7. 'Out of the whirl wind': Myth of the Blaze and Primitive ; Appendices
