The Existential World of George Oppen

Abstract

salute serious craftsman, wrote Ezra Pound in his preface to Discrete Series, George Oppen's first volume, a sensibility which not every man's sensibility and which has not been got out of any other man's books. Oppen's sensibility indeed not every man's but it one clearly belongs to its age. And he has turned out to be much more than serious craftsman. Metaphysically inclined, even in the earlier imagistic pieces Pound was describing, Oppen presents stark but intense world in which nothing certain but the sheer existence of nature and the pressure of feelings and sensations on the mind encounters it. From the beginning, imagism was, for Oppen, cognitive as well as formal technique: objects could only be known imagistically, by one's sensation of them, and not discursively.1 Thus Oppen sought to method of thought from the imagist . . . intensity of vision, method would represent test of truth or at least test of sincerity, based on the idea that there moment, an actual time, when you believe something to be true, and you construct meaning from those moments of conviction. Discrete Series ( 1934) in effect Cartesian investigation by imagistic rather than rationalistic means. A discrete series, Oppen explains, is series of terms each of which empirically derived, each one of which empirically true. And this the reason for the fragmentary character of those poems. I was attempting to construct meaning by empirical statements, by imagist statements.2 Imagist thought form of nominalism in which, to repeat, appreciation of the existence of the object in its tangibility replaces thought about the object: