In "Route"--a poem from George Oppen's Of Being Numerous (1968), which won the 1969 Pulitzer Prize and whose title-poem critics regard as his major work--Oppen modestly states his aesthetic, philosophical, and political aims: "I might at the top of my ability stand at a window / and say, look out; out thhere is the world." Venturing out across the threshold of received knowledge, past the "window" of artistic preconception and social privilege--these are the paradigmatic moves of Oppen's life and work: entering the landscape "out there," through the ostensibly simple, though existentially complex, activity of naming "the world." This activity Oppen grounds in the contingent particulars of life and language, for the sake of affirming not only the referential power of words but also the world's ineluctable thereness. With a phenomenologist's attention to the mysterious interplay of subject and object, a socialist's concern for the individual's vulnerability to the determining...