SOURCE: “The Objectivist Tradition: Some Further Considerations,” in Conviction's Net of Branches: Essays on the Objectivist Poets and Poetry, Southern Illinois University Press, 1985, pp 97–106.

In the following essay, Heller explores the poetics of Objectivism.

George Oppen states in the opening passage of Of Being Numerous:

There are things We live among ‘and to see them Is to know ourselves.’(1) 

Among “things” we live with, see, and come to know ourselves by are the poems of our time. For poetry, Heidegger reminds us, is an act which founds whole historical worlds. An Objectivist poetry, involving a poetics more or less subscribed to by a group of poets labeled Objectivists, who were in constant contact with each other over three or four decades, founds its Heideggerian historical worlds in “rested totality,” Zukofsky might claim, in sincerities and objectifications as fields of possibility rather than in strictures on form. For we...