Getting the Joke in “Of Being Numerous”: George Oppen as Heir to Walt Whitman's Public Poetics

Abstract

In the summer of 1960, George Oppen (1908-84) remarked in a letter to his friend William Carlos Williams (1883-1963), People who are afraid to talk won't produce much poetry. Tho Whitman has been no use to me (Selected Letters 38-39). His comment recalls something Whitman (1819-92) said in a letter to one of his friends, William Sloane Kennedy (1850-1929), in 1887: It is of no importance whether I had read [Ralph Waldo] Emerson [1803-82] before starting L. of G. [Leaves of Grass (1855)] or not. The fact happens to be positively that I had (Correspondence IV 69). Taken in isolation, both statements are misleading (if not outright lies), though the date and context of Oppen's letter leaves open the possibility that he was referring to his early career, prior to his long hiatus from poetry, which began in 1935. When Oppen returned to writing poems in 1958, he soon found a use for Whitman. One of the first poems Oppen wrote upon returning, I Sing, published in the January 1960 issue of Poetry, portrays Whitman as a kind of poetic foil for Oppen's more sober regard for working-class Americans. The book in which this poem was collected, The Materials (1962), reveals a sophisticated engagement with Whitman, stressing Whitman's materialist aesthetics and linguistic theories. Oppen's response intensified in his best-known and most widely celebrated work, Being (the title poem of Of Being Numerous [1968]), which responds directly to Song of Myself (1855). Here, Oppen portrays a Civil War-era Whitman and concludes by using Whitman's words-a letter he wrote to his mother in 1864-and manipulating them with a deceptively simple yet telling formal gesture. While other modernist poets' reactions to Whitman have received greater focus, only Oppen devoted his best-known and most ambitious work to the task of responding to and revising Whitman's conception of a public poetry for Americans. In these poems and in his interviews, notes, and letters, Oppen relates himself to the Whitmanic vision in a more thorough and telling manner than his better-known modernist peers, many of whom issued more brazen public statements on Whitman but showed little of Oppen's nuance in interpreting and revising Whitman's reception.Oppen's engagement with Whitman is rich and broadly significant for American poetics, but there has been little critical commentary on his response. Outside of a handful of brief references in a few essays and early reviews, only two critics have approached their relationship. Peter O'Leary (b. 1968) analyzes some details of Oppen's response in Being Numerous, and Zack Finch (birth date unknown) compares how the two poets portray the human body and interpret the importance of physical contact.1 The paucity of commentary on what seems an obvious subject, especially given Oppen's increasing acclaim and critical stature, can be partially explained by Oppen's early reception, which focused on his relationships to Ezra Pound (1885-1972), who helped launch his career by writing the preface to Oppen's first book, Discrete Series (1934);2 to Louis Zukofsky (1904-78), a onetime mentor with whom Oppen later experienced an acrimonious split; and to William Carlos Williams, whose minimalist style and emphasis on direct perception of the outside world made him a natural touchstone for early readers. Even after Oppen portrayed Whitman and used his letter to conclude Being Numerous, few seemed to grasp Whitman's importance to Oppen's poetry. While in their visual appearance on the page, Oppen's poems look more like Williams's, Oppen himself realized that, in attempting a populist poetics and in developing his ideas regarding individual ethics and poetic responsibility, he would need to come to terms with his more loquacious poetic ancestor. Using Whitman variously as foil, icon, compatriot, and source text, Oppen developed some of Whitman's most important themes into perhaps the most distinctive and persuasive statement on the problem of a public poetics in the United States since Whitman's own Song of Myself. …