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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 January 2010
This article offers a revisionist reading of the aesthetic of the American modernist poet George Oppen. It seeks, in the first instance, to supplement those established readings of Oppen that have concluded that his work is most profitably understood in the discursive contexts of American literary modernism and modern European Continental philosophy by arguing that such approaches overlook a key indigenous intellectual influence upon his corpus: that body of philosophical inquiry and cultural self-reflection that has come to be known as American pragmatism. The article attempts to rectify this omission by making two simultaneous and complementary suggestions: first, that pragmatic thought opens up a number of formal and semantic questions – indeed, a number of questions about the relationship between form and meaning – that have been too little considered in recent work on American poetry; and second, that something crucial to Oppen's poetry remains unthinkable without sustained attention to the questions and claims that pragmatism places at the very heart of its endeavour. While the relationship between pragmatist thought and Oppen's poetics helps to illuminate a set of concerns that lies at the very core of his aesthetic, the paper will argue, it also reciprocally exposes the limitations of an influential genealogical vision of American literary modernism. To support this contention it examines the ways in which a certain literary version of American intellectual history has reinterpreted the pragmatism of William James in the image of an Emersonian linguistic scepticism in order to establish the historical centrality of a broadly Romantic genealogy of American modernism. The paper concludes by suggesting that a renewed attention to the specific forms and modalities of Oppen's poetry demonstrates not only the inadequacy of this version of literary history to a particular tradition of American poetics, but also promises to recover the force and distinctiveness of the American pragmatist inheritance for succeeding generations of writers.
1 See George Oppen: The Collected Poems, ed. Michael Davidson (New York: New Directions, 2002); and Peter Nicholls, George Oppen and the Fate of Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
2 For an “objectivist” reading of Oppen see Marjorie Perloff, “The Shape of the Lines': George Oppen and the Metric of Difference,” in idem, The Dance of the Intellect: Studies in the Poetry of the Pound Tradition (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1985), 119–34; for a “phenomenological” reading of Oppen see Paul Kenneth Naylor, “The Pre-position ‘Of’: Being, Seeing and Knowing in George Oppen's Poetry,” Contemporary Literature, 32, 1 (Spring 1991), 100–15; for a “Heideggerean” reading of Oppen see Nicholls, 62–82; and for a reading of Oppen as an artist of the American political left see Eric Homberger, “George Oppen and the Culture of the American Left,” in Burton Hatlen, ed., George Oppen: Man and Poet (Orono, ME: University of Maine Press, 1981), 181–93.
3 William Carlos Williams, Collected Poems I: 1909–1939 (Manchester: Carcanet, 2000), 217.
4 Richard Poirier, Poetry and Pragmatism (London: Faber, 1992), 3–4.
5 Ibid., 5.
6 Ibid., 10–11.
7 Ibid., 11.
8 Stanley Cavell expresses some of his reservations about the identification of Emerson as a “pragmatist” in his essay “What's the Use of Calling Emerson a Pragmatist” in his Emerson's Transcendental Etudes, ed. David Justin Hodge (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 215–23.
9 Emerson, “Circles,” in Poirier, 28.
10 Jonathan Levin, The Poetics of Transition: Emerson, Pragmatism, and American Literary Modernism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), ix.
11 Poirier, 3.
12 William James, Pragmatism (New York: Dover, 1995), 20.
13 Kloppenberg, James T., “Pragmatism: An Old Word for Some New Ways of Thinking,” Journal of American History, 83, 1 (1996), 100–38, 102.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
14 James, 21.
15 Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Portable Emerson, ed. Carl Bode (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), 153 and 229.
16 Ibid., 229.
17 Ibid., 35.
18 William James, The Principles of Psychology, Volume I, ed. Frederick H. Burckhardt (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 265. I am indebted to Jonathan Levin for his reading of this passage; see The Poetics of Transition, 48.
19 James, The Principles of Psychology, 266.
20 Ibid., 236.
21 Ibid., 237.
22 Ibid., 238.
23 James, Pragmatism, 90.
24 Louis Zukofsky, “Sincerity and Objectification,” Poetry, 37, 5 (Feb. 1931), 273, 274.
25 Ibid., 272.
26 Ibid., 274.
27 George Oppen, The Selected Letters of George Oppen, ed. Rachel Blau DuPlessis (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990), 40.
28 It should perhaps be noted that recent scholarship upon Zukofsky has tended to emphasize his consciousness of both the fluidity and the dialectical possibilities of poetic form at the expense of any notion of a “rested totality” of objectified particulars. Thus Tim Woods in his reading of “A” suggests that Zukofsky's “strategy of writing” in that poem is “a means by which fragments can combat totality by insisting on negativity and yet can maintain an informing process of ‘comprehensive’ social interrelations.” Tim Woods, The Poetics of the Limit: Ethics and Politics in Modern And Contemporary American Poetry (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 60.
29 Dembo, L. S., “The Objectivist Poet: Four Interviews,” Contemporary Literature, 10, 2 (Spring 1969), 155–219, 161.Google Scholar
30 Perloff, The Dance of the Intellect, 124.
31 Ibid., 124.
32 Levin, The Poetics of Transition, 45.
33 James, Pragmatism, 100.
34 Poirier, Poetry and Pragmatism, 132.
35 James, Pragmatism, 21.
36 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, The Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London: Routledge, 1994), 16.
37 James, Pragmatism, 79.
38 Ibid., 114.
39 George Oppen, George Oppen: New Collected Poems, ed. Michael Davidson (New York: New Directions, 2002), 166.
