George Oppen
George Oppen – Life, Career, and Selected Quotes
George Oppen (1908–1984) was an influential American Objectivist poet whose spare, rigorous verse and moral seriousness earned him a Pulitzer Prize. Explore his biography, major works, philosophy, and memorable lines.
Introduction
George Oppen stands among the most exacting and quietly radical voices in American poetry. His work belongs to the lineage of the Objectivist movement, which sought to see things clearly, unsentimentally, and with moral integrity. After a long hiatus from writing, Oppen returned with renewed urgency in midlife, producing poetry that probes how one can live ethically among “things” and others. His life journey—from affluence to political activism to exile and return—infuses his poetry with a weighty tension between the ideal and the actual.
Early Life and Family
George Oppen was born April 24, 1908 in New Rochelle, New York, to Elsie Rothfeld and George Oppenheimer. In 1927, the family name was legally shortened from “Oppenheimer” to “Oppen.”
Though born into relative affluence, Oppen’s early life was marked by tragedy. His mother died by suicide when he was about four years old. His father remarried, bringing in a stepmother, Seville Shainwald, with whom Oppen had a difficult relationship.
In 1917, the family moved to San Francisco, and young Oppen attended the Warren Military Academy. He had a troubled adolescence: he was involved in a fatal car crash as a young driver, and this incident contributed to his expulsion from school just before graduation.
After leaving school, Oppen traveled to England and Scotland, where he attended lectures in philosophy and visited relatives.
In 1926 he enrolled at Oregon State Agricultural College (now Oregon State University), where he met Mary Colby, who became his lifelong partner. A scandal early in their relationship (spending the night out) led to Mary being expelled and Oppen suspended. They left Oregon and began traveling together across the United States, doing odd jobs and nurturing a shared poetic impulse.
Poetic Emergence & The Objectivist Years
Around 1929, Oppen inherited a modest sum, which gave him and Mary some financial flexibility to pursue literary interests. They lived for a time in France, where Oppen and Louis Zukofsky collaborated in launching To Publishers, a small press that published work by Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and others.
On returning to the U.S. in the early 1930s, Oppen and his circle (including Zukofsky, Reznikoff, Williams) helped found Objectivist Press. His first major work, Discrete Series, was published in 1934 by Objectivist Press, with a preface by Ezra Pound. From early on, Oppen’s poetic concern centered on how one might attend to “objects” and perceptions without interference—from cliché, ideology, or overinterpretation.
Politics, Silence, and War
By the mid-1930s, in response to the Great Depression and the rise of fascism, Oppen and Mary turned toward political activism. He joined the Communist Party USA, worked on union and relief projects, and campaigned in Brooklyn in 1936. Yet Oppen felt poetry could not easily serve politics, and in 1935 (or shortly after) he ceased writing for a long stretch.
During World War II, though initially deferred, Oppen voluntarily gave himself up for the draft, fought in Europe, and was severely wounded. He was awarded a Purple Heart. After the war, due to his earlier Communist associations, he faced suspicion from HUAC (House Un-American Activities Committee). In 1950, to avoid persecution and loss of freedom, Oppen and Mary relocated to Mexico, where he worked as a furniture maker / carpenter and lived in relative obscurity.
He did not write poetry during most of the “Mexico years.”
Return to Poetry and Later Career
In 1958, Oppen and Mary returned to the United States, reestablishing residence in Brooklyn. It was then that Oppen resumed writing. His next book, The Materials (1962), marked the end of his long silence and reintroduced his poetics. He followed it with This in Which (1965) and then Of Being Numerous (1968). Of Being Numerous was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1969.
In the 1970s, Oppen’s Collected Poems (1975) and Myth of the Blaze were published. His final volume, Primitive (1978), was completed with assistance from Mary, as Oppen’s health had begun to decline (he manifested early Alzheimer’s symptoms).
In his later years, he moved to California, where he died July 7, 1984, in a convalescent home, the proximate cause being pneumonia compounded by Alzheimer’s disease.
Poetic Philosophy & Style
Objectivism and Clarity
Oppen is often grouped with the Objectivist poets—a movement that emphasized sincerity, intelligence, and the poem as an object of attention, not a vehicle for rhetoric. For Oppen, “things” are not merely metaphors but the locus of moral and perceptive engagement. He prized clarity above all:
“Clarity, clarity, surely clarity is the most beautiful thing in the world…”
He was skeptical of art’s capacity to “solve” situations:
“There are situations which cannot honorably be met by art.”
Oppen believed that objects (and their relations) explain each other rather than themselves:
“Things explain each other, not themselves.”
Silence, Renewal, and Moral Tension
His decades of silence are often interpreted as a moral and aesthetic act—he refused to write when he felt poetry could not bear up under social realities.
When he resumed, his voice was tempered by absence—less exuberant, more urgent.
His poetry often moves by leaps, gathering associations rather than following linear narrative.
Many poems grapple with how individual consciousness stands among multiplicities ("being numerous")—the plural, the object, the communal.
Notable Works
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Discrete Series (1934)
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The Materials (1962)
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This in Which (1965)
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Of Being Numerous (1968) — Pulitzer Prize winner
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Collected Poems (1975) + Myth of the Blaze
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Primitive (1978)
He also left behind posthumous collections and editions of letters, daybooks, and prose: Selected Prose, Daybooks, and Papers.
Selected Quotes
Here are several memorable lines by George Oppen:
“Clarity, clarity, surely clarity is the most beautiful thing in the world, A limited, limiting clarity I have not and never did have any motive of poetry But to achieve clarity.”
“There are situations which cannot honorably be met by art.”
“Things explain each other, not themselves.”
“The first question at that time in poetry was simply the question of honesty, of sincerity.”
“A pure mathematical series would be one in which each term is derived from the preceding term by a rule.”
“It is necessary to study these words you have written, for the words have a longer history than you have and say more than you know.”
“I am no longer sure of the words, The clockwork of the world. … We must talk now. Fear is fear. But we abandon one another.”
These lines reveal his care with language, his attention to objecthood, and his moral unease.
Lessons from George Oppen
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Respect the object
Oppen teaches that things—ordinary, material, present—should command our attention. Poetry begins in the world, not in abstractions. -
Silence can be integral
His decades away from poetry underline that one must sometimes withhold until one can speak with integrity. -
Clarity as moral posture
He shows us that clarity is not just aesthetic but ethical: to see clearly is, in part, to live rightly. -
Poetry’s limits
He recognized that art cannot always remedy injustice; poetry’s value lies partly in bearing witness, not in offering solutions. -
Plurality over singular persona
His notion of “being numerous” suggests that identity is not solitary but relational, embedded in multiplicities.
Conclusion
George Oppen lived a life under tension: between wealth and solidarity, silence and speech, form and urgency, the individual and the collective. His poetry is exact, demanding, and rooted in moral awareness. In his work, one hears not just a voice, but a careful presence—someone attending to things, to others, to what it might mean to take a stand in language.