SOURCE: “Oppen and Pound,” in Paideuma, Vol. 10, No. 2, Spring, 1981, pp. 59-83.

In the following essay, Blau DuPlessis discusses Pound's influence on Oppen's poetry, and examines their poetic and political dissimilarities.

… poetry must be at least as well written as prose, etc. It must also be at least as good as dead silence.¹

In a review of Ginsberg, McClure and Olson, published in 1962, as he was publishing the poems of his return, George Oppen strongly suggests that each of these poets exemplifies a tendency in current writing which he must reject; by this review, Oppen tacitly situates himself in relation to some significant contemporaries. On a line between “histrionics and … openness,” Ginsberg's mode is often “declamatory”; indeed “to quarrel with that is simply to quarrel with the heart of his work.” McClure's mode reduces poetic desire to “excitement, intoxication, meaninglessness, a destruction of the sense of oneself among things...