SOURCE: “‘At Least Not Nowhere’: George Oppen as Maine Poet,” in Paideuma, Vol. 10, No. 2, Spring, 1981, pp. 53-8.

In the following essay, Hunting surveys the effects of several geographies on Oppen's poetry.

Oppen is such a good objectivist. Besides supplying money for the movement's early publishing efforts, he has remained true to its tenets as set forth by Williams and has made his poems artifacts “consonant with his day.” Yet Oppen is very much present in his poems—even if sometimes by his seeming absence. Over them, through them, broods a personality at once anguished and delicate, cryptic and open, terribly vulnerable to experience and sensation and thus occasionally brutal. It is in his Maine poems that these tensions are eased, not entirely resolved, but allowed an alleviation and hence a naturalness of expression less often permitted in Oppen's other land- and seascapes.

Why should this be so? If...