George Oppen Biography Quotes 8 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
George Oppen was born in 1908 in New Rochelle, New York, and grew up in a prosperous family whose resources enabled him to read widely and discover poetry at an early age. He was drawn to the spare clarity of modernist writing and to ideas about accuracy and honesty in perception. As a young man he left formal schooling and set out into adult life with an impatience for convention and a belief that experience in the world would teach him more than classrooms. During these years he met Mary Colby, who would become Mary Oppen, his lifelong partner in art and politics as well as in daily life. Their bond quickly became the central fact of his personal world and a source of intellectual and moral companionship that sustained him through long periods of silence and risk.

Becoming an Objectivist Poet
Oppen came of age as a poet among the writers later called the Objectivists, a group associated with Louis Zukofsky, Charles Reznikoff, and, in kindred spirit, William Carlos Williams. He was also encouraged by Ezra Pound, whose interest in precision and the musical line resonated with Oppen's developing sense of craft. In 1934 Oppen published Discrete Series, a first book whose narrow columns, crisp diction, and attention to the seen world became a touchstone for minimalist rigor. Alongside Mary, he helped sustain small-press ventures that kept innovative poetry in circulation at a time when mainstream outlets were rare. The circle around Zukofsky and Reznikoff reinforced Oppen's conviction that sincerity and clarity were not abstractions but tasks the poem had to accomplish in each image and line break.

Political Commitment and Wartime Service
The economic and social catastrophes of the 1930s deepened Oppen's commitment to collective life. He joined left-wing political efforts and, for years, allowed activism to take priority over writing. Poetry, he felt, had to be justified by the reality it faced, and for a long stretch he chose action over publication. During the Second World War he served in the U.S. Army in Europe and was wounded in combat. The war did not make him a public poet of pronouncement; instead it intensified his desire to speak with scrupulous exactness about what can be known and witnessed. After the war he remained politically visible, and the pressures of the early Cold War would soon force difficult decisions on him and his family.

Exile and Return to Poetry
Amid anti-communist investigations in the early 1950s, Oppen and Mary left the United States and lived in Mexico for several years. The move placed him at a distance from the literary world, yet it also created the conditions for rethinking his task as a poet. In the late 1950s he returned to the United States, settled on the West Coast, and began writing again after a decades-long silence. The Materials (1962) and This In Which (1965) announced his return with a voice both chastened and newly confident, turning to the textures of urban life, labor, family, and the ethical dimensions of attention. His third book of the period, Of Being Numerous (1968), examined the relation between the individual and the city, the crowd and the self. In 1969 it received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, a recognition that placed him, late in life, firmly within the canon of American modernism.

Poetics and Influence
Oppen's work is lean, exact, and argumentative in the quietest possible way. He described poetry as a test of sincerity: the poem earns its truth by looking steadily at the world and refusing consoling rhetoric. This ethic aligned him with Zukofsky's insistence on objectification and with Reznikoff's documentary poise, even as he kept faith with Williams's American idiom and Pound's attention to the line. Oppen's poems examine how perception is made, how words meet things, and how a life is conducted among others. The city is central, not as scenery but as a problem of ethics and perception. Of Being Numerous became a touchstone for later poets seeking to join social thought with imagistic exactness. His midcentury rediscovery by readers and younger writers expanded the reach of the Objectivist lineage and reshaped the conversation about modernist legacies in the United States.

Mary Oppen and the Work of a Life
George and Mary Oppen formed one of the most enduring partnerships in twentieth-century American letters. Mary read drafts, argued lines, helped to run publishing ventures, and held together the practical world that let him write. Her memoir, Meaning a Life, maps their shared commitments to art, labor, and political risk, and offers a companion narrative to his poetry. Together they raised a family and made homes in places that allowed them to live modestly and attentively. Their household became a site of conversation, hospitality, and reflection, with friends and fellow writers passing through to argue about aesthetics and politics late into the night.

Later Work and Recognition
After Of Being Numerous, Oppen continued to refine his art. Seascape: Needle's Eye (1972) extended his meditation on perception by turning to sea light, coastlines, and the slow measure of thought. Additional volumes in the 1970s sustained his concentrated gaze, and selections and collections of his poems brought him new audiences. Awards, fellowships, and invitations arrived late, after years of invisibility, and he accepted them without altering the spare, exacting manner of his work. He remained committed to the ethical stakes of looking and naming, convinced that truth in poetry was a kind of moral action.

Illness, Death, and Legacy
In his final years Oppen suffered from Alzheimer's disease, which steadily diminished his capacity to write. Even as language began to recede, the values that shaped his poems remained visible in his habits of attention and in the conversations he could still sustain. He died in 1984. By then his reputation had moved from the margins to a central place in the history of American poetry. Readers and scholars came to see him as a crucial link between early modernism and later experimental traditions, a poet whose austerity was a discipline of care. His books remain in print, his letters and notebooks have been studied for the record they keep of a mind testing its honesty, and his example continues to guide poets who want language to face the world without evasion. Through the steady companionship of Mary Oppen and the formative influence of friends such as Louis Zukofsky, Charles Reznikoff, William Carlos Williams, and Ezra Pound, George Oppen fashioned a body of work whose clarity is inseparable from its courage.

Our collection contains 8 quotes who is written by George, under the main topics: Truth - Art - Writing - Deep - Poetry.