SOURCE: “Third Phase Objectivism,” in Paideuma, Vol. 10, No. 1, Spring, 1981, pp. 85-9.

In the following essay, Silliman discusses Oppen's relation to several postwar movements in American poetry.

Objectivism's third or renaissance phase, from 1960 onward, is the most problematic of that literary movement's periods, simultaneously its most influential and least cohesive time, mixing a resurgence of interest in existing texts with the production of new writings, altering the very definition of that curious rubric as it was being used to rewrite the literary history of the thirties and forties. Its absence, the long second phase of neglect, had been marked clearly by the extremism, both in form and content, so many of the New American poets of the fifties had found necessary to bridge the distance between themselves and those twin sources of a rigorous, open-form, speech-based poetics, Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams. Not surprisingly, the return of the...