Stouthearted men.(Verse chronicle)(poems of George Oppen, Franz Wright, Tony Hoagland and Spencer Reece and Philip Larkin)

George Oppen was one of the minor literary figures of the 1930s. (1) Friend of Pound, employer of Zukofsky, collaborator with Williams and Reznikoff, an animating spirit of the Objectivist movement, he was a young man with ideals and a little money, who with more money, or fewer ideals, might have become as useful as James Laughlin. In 1935, Oppen joined the Communist Party, while concealing his bourgeois past as a poet (this might have told him something about the party, if Stalin's purges did not). For the next twenty years or more, Oppen swore off poetry; when not training for party leadership, he organized the poor, fomented strikes, and protested against monopolies (though the aim of any union is to exploit a monopoly of labor). During World War II, he was wounded while serving in an anti-tank unit in Europe. After the war he built furniture, attended art school in Mexico on the GI Bill, and added to his swollen FBI file.

In the late Fifties, Oppen began writing again, in the starved, cruelly compressed style abandoned decades before. This resurrection of a poet so long out of touch, and even out of date, proved irresistible to young writers influenced by William Carlos Williams. The minor figure of the Thirties became a minor figure of the Sixties. Before the decade was over, he had won the Pulitzer Prize.

Oppen's spareness was like that of a Zen master with a migraine:

 
  Never to forget her naked eyes 
 
   Beautiful and brave 
   Her naked eyes 
 
   Turn inward 
 
   Feminine light 
 
   The unimagined 
   Feminine light 
 
   Feminine ardor 

Paring away his poems until they were nearly skeletons, he was often left with just a few ribs and some knucklebones. His critics, who have frequently been his disciples, have made high claims for Oppen's minimalism, which he pursued more aggressively than Williams, though it could seem pinched and hectoring, a telegram from Moscow instructing you that everything you thought yesterday is wrong. In Pound or Williams, you see details refined until they glow with the special light of Imagism; but in Oppen you seem to get farther, down to the sludge at the bottom of the glass.

Oppen's poems are plain as a brown paper bag, slightly depressing, maudlin about people in a Thirties way (which was also a Sixties way), often tone-deaf to the virtues of language (that is his virtue, say his critics): "We want to say//'Common sense'/ And cannot. We stand on//That denial/Of death that paved the cities,/ Paved the cities// Generation/ For generation." The world of Oppen's poems has removed all that might qualify or enrich it, that might make it more various than some shopworn Platonic form. Michelangelo chiseled away the marble until he reached the figure--but what made him a genius was knowing when he'd reached the figure. In other words, he knew when to stop.

Oppen's ambition often seems in excess of the words he left behind. At best his sketchy, expressionist method pays homage to the shudders and hesitations of thought; but this is fiendishly difficult to do well--otherwise H.D. and Edith Sitwell would be geniuses (the attempt to compare Oppen to Paul Celan is ludicrous). Oppen lived for pretentious observation and barnyard wisdom--"How much of the earth's/Crust has lived/ The seed's violence!" His reviewers have used phrases like "stunning, elliptical," "the twentieth century's most dazzling maker of lines," "verse that sparkles like broken glass." Such opinions seem quaint as fossils.