SOURCE: “Unrolling Universe: A Reading of Oppen's This in Which,” in Paideuma, Vol. 10, No. 2, Spring, 1981, pp. 105-128.

In the following essay, McAleavy offers an explication of Oppen's This in Which.

In that ample matrix of possibilities, The Materials (1962), Oppen sometimes hoped to explain or integrate self-consciousness by using a metaphor of birth: the self, he argues, is born into the world and grasps outward toward the present. If the self-conscious self should fully reach the present—which is the giddy hope of The Materials—union could occur. Such a transcendence is contemplated or aspired to in “Eclogue,” “Image of the Engine,” “Sara in Her Father's Arms,” “The Men of Sheepshead,” and many other poems.

In This in Which (1965) Oppen abandons the birth metaphor, but his chief desire remains that of achieving an immediate, reciprocal relation with the world. The difference is that in the later book this desire...