SOURCE: A review of Discrete Series, in Poetry, Vol. XLIV, No. IV, July, 1934, pp. 220-25.

In the following essay, Williams reviews Discrete Series, discusses what makes a poem a poem and what makes a poem good, and praises Oppen for the quality of his poems.

Mr. Oppen has given us thirty-seven pages of short poems, well printed and well bound, around which several statements relative to modern verse forms may well be made.

The appearance of a book of poems, if it be a book of good poems, is an important event because of relationships the work it contains will have with thought and accomplishment in other contemporary reaches of the intelligence. This leads to a definition of the term “good.” If the poems in the book constitute necessary corrections of or emendations to human conduct in their day, both as to thought and manner, then they are...