Life & Wisdom Quote by George Oppen

Clarity is Oppen's secular prayer, and he repeats the word like someone trying to talk himself into faith. The insistence is the point: not a serene, achieved lucidity, but an anxious, hard-won one. When he calls it "the most beautiful thing in the world", he's staking beauty on precision rather than flourish, rejecting the old romantic bargain that poetry earns its keep through mystery.

Then he undercuts himself: "A limited, limiting clarity". That double-edged phrasing admits what modernist rigor can cost. Clarity isn't innocence; it's a choice that trims away possibilities, excludes the lush, the associative, the purely musical. Oppen is honest about the violence of selection. Every clear line is also a closed door, and he wants you to feel that closure as part of the aesthetic.

Context matters because Oppen isn't just theorizing on a campus lawn. He was an Objectivist poet, committed to the poem as a made thing and to seeing the world without consoling haze. He also famously stopped writing for decades, pulled into politics, war, and the moral urgency of the 20th century. That biography haunts the claim that he had "never did have any motive of poetry" but clarity: it's an ethical posture as much as a style. In an era thick with propaganda, spectacle, and rhetorical inflation, clarity becomes resistance - a refusal to let language do what power wants it to do. The subtext is stark: if words can't be trusted, nothing can. Oppen makes trust the poem's real subject.