SOURCE: “Inaugural and Valedictory: The Early Poetry of George Oppen,” in Modern American Poetry, edited by R. W. (Herbie) Butterfield, Vision and Barnes and Noble, 1984, pp. 142-157.

In the following essay, Crozier examines the poems in Oppen's first collection, Discrete Series.

Although Of Being Numerous (1968) and Primitive (1978) are arguably George Oppen's mature achievement, rightly attended to and admired as such by many of his readers, these late works are rooted in and a fulfilment of his early work, which they comment on and acknowledge. Yet reference to Oppen's ‘early’ work incurs immediate uncertainty, since his career can be seen to possess two separate points of departure, first with the poems written during the late '20s and early '30s assembled in Discrete Series (1934), and again in the poems of the late '50s and early '60s collected in The Materials (1962). To what extent these different beginnings...