Description
Book SynopsisFew poets have been as adamant about the uselessness of their art in the face of history as American poet George Oppen (19081984), and yet, few poets have been as viscerally convinced of the important role of the poem in restoring meaning to our words. Oppen came to maturity between two world wars, at the time of the Depression, and gave up poetry just when he had embraced it. In the 1960s and 1970s, however, his new work seemed to many poets and critics to represent the epitome of poetic virtue in dark times. Whereas Oppen wrote of the lost sense of the commonplace, his readers found in his poetry the means to reclaim the poet's role within the community.
George Oppen's Poetics of the Commonplace offers the first survey of the critical consensus which has now built up around the poetry of George Oppen, after over two decades of substantial interest in his work. It proposes a comprehensive perspective on Oppen and the criticism devoted to Oppen, from the Objectivist strain
Table of ContentsPreface – Acknowledgments – List of Abbreviations – Introduction: In the Land of Uz – Structures of Meaning – Rhythmic Obligations – That Common Wealth of Parlance – The Image-Statement – A Dream of Politics – A Realist Poetry – Germane Questions, German Concepts – Unethical Criticism – Simple and Primitive: History’s Children – Conclusion: To Heal the Diction – Index.
