SOURCE: “Deep Image and the Poetics of Oppen's ‘Of Being Numerous,’” in Sagetrieb, The National Poetry Foundation, Inc., Vol. 13, No. 3, Winter, 1994, pp. 71-82.

In the following essay, Cramer compares Oppen's objectivism with the deep image poetics of James Wright and Robert Bly.

In 1963, June Oppen Degnan attempted to interest her brother in Jungian psychology. Although George Oppen found Jung's character compelling, he dismissed the Jungian system, calling it finally “muddy, so lazy minded” (“Letters” 224). In his rejection of Jung, Oppen opposed himself to the philosophical basis for the “deep image” poetry exemplified by Robert Bly and James Wright, one of the most formidable poetic movements of the 1960s.

The differences in poetics between Oppen and the deep imagists are fundamental because Oppen departed from Jung at the most fundamental level:

There seems to me in Jung a degree of mystery hunting of which the result, if not the...