Life & Wisdom Quote by George Oppen

Sometimes the ethical demand of reality exceeds what art can responsibly do. George Oppen makes that claim with a soldier’s bluntness and a poet’s conscience. He knew the temptation to turn catastrophe into style, to make an image where action is needed, and he distrusted it. During the Depression he and his wife Mary left the literary world to organize for the unemployed; in World War II he enlisted and was wounded in the Ardennes. For more than two decades after his first book, he chose silence rather than risk the easy eloquence that might aestheticize suffering or function as propaganda. Honor, for him, required either doing the thing itself or refusing to make it beautiful.

The word honorably is the hinge. Art can meet almost anything, but not always without compromise. Some events are so saturated with urgency and pain that to transform them into craft is to reshape them for the wrong purposes: to console when the wound must be kept open, to display when the moment demands privacy, to speak when silence keeps faith with the dead. Oppen’s caution is not a rejection of art but a refusal of its evasions. He warns against the self-flattering idea that a poem substitutes for solidarity, or that a novel repairs a broken policy.

When he returned to poetry in the 1960s, he wrote differently, with the Objectivist emphasis on clarity, sincerity, and the small nouns of the world. A poem like Of Being Numerous tries to face the social fact without false heroics: city, crowd, labor, the stubborn fact of other people. That return embodies the other side of his claim. After action, after witness, art can honor what it addresses by resisting ornament, by acknowledging limits, by speaking only what can be said. The line therefore stands as a moral test for artists: if making is how you avoid doing, put the art down. If making is how you tell the truth, proceed with care.