SOURCE: “The Mind of George Oppen: Conviction's Net of Branches,” in Conviction's Net of Branches, Southern Illinois University Press, 1985, pp. 73-96.

In the following essay, Heller characterizes Oppen's poetry as not merely reflecting the effect modern life upon the self, but rather showing the self investigating modern life.

In one of George Oppen's poems, the poet is being driven around an island off the coast of Maine by a poor fisherman and his wife. The landscape, the lobster pots and the fishing gear, the harbor and the post office are passed, and the poet is, unaccountably, moved by a nearly metaphysical sense of passage. The experience is at once intimate and remote, and the poet is moved to exclaim to himself “difficult to know what one means /—to be serious and to know what one means—.”¹ Such lines could be emblems for all of Oppen's entire career; for...