SOURCE: “Political Commitment and Poetic Subjectification: George Oppen's Test of Truth,” in Contemporary Literature, Vol. 22, No. 1, Winter, 1981, pp. 24-41.

In the following essay, Finkelstein argues that Oppen resolves the conflict between his social ethics and objectivist aesthetics in his poetry through the “interpenetration of the subject's reaction to the object.”

As an heir of modernist poetics, George Oppen, like all poetic inheritors, appears simultaneously as disciple and iconoclast. For Oppen, Pound is a fairly remote mentor and Williams is an older pioneer. The ground they broke becomes the foundation of a literary venture that both reinterprets and challenges modernist poetics on formal and ideological grounds. Oppen and his fellow objectivists may be seen as the followers of a well-established modernist tradition, a view best expressed by Hugh Kenner: “They are the best testimony to the strength of that tradition: to the fact that it had substance separable from...