Time & Perspective Quote by George Oppen

Oppen frames poetry as a moral emergency, not a decorative art. When he says the first question was "honesty, of sincerity", he’s talking less about confessional self-expression than about whether language can still be trusted to name the world without falsifying it. Coming out of the wreckage of the early-to-mid 20th century - depression, war, ideological propaganda, the mass production of slogans - sincerity stops being a virtue and becomes a survival skill. If public speech has been weaponized, then the poem’s job is to rebuild a unit of meaning you can stand on.

The line also quietly polices the poet’s ego. "At that time" gestures toward a historical pressure that dwarfs personal style: the point isn’t to sound original, it’s to be answerable. Oppen, tied to Objectivism and marked by political commitment and long silences, treats the poem as an instrument that must earn its authority. Honesty here means resisting the easy lyric swell, the prepackaged emotion, the ornamental metaphor that flatters writer and reader alike. Sincerity is not volume; it’s precision.

There’s an implicit critique of poetic culture, too: when the first question is sincerity, it suggests the defaults were suspect. Oppen makes craft secondary to credibility, but not anti-craft; the subtext is that technique is only valuable insofar as it clarifies rather than seduces. In a century allergic to truth-claims, he wagers that a poem can still tell the truth, if it first refuses to lie.