SOURCE: “Lyric Incorporated: The Serial Object of George Oppen and Langston Hughes,” in Sagetrieb, Vol. 12, No. 3, Winter, 1993, pp. 105-24.

In the following essay, Shoptaw considers similarities between the work of Oppen and Langston Hughes, and their relation to the socio-economic cultures in which they were produced and which they reproduced in their poetry.

Well, I can understand what people who object to taking a poem apart are saying. On the other hand, I don't think a poem is all that fragile.

—George Oppen¹

Be nice to people on your way up because you'll meet' em on your way down.

—attributed to Jimmy Durante

1. the Object of the Poem.

In 1968, long after the emergence of the objectivists, George Oppen explained that the “objectivist” poetics meant “the objectification of the poem, the making an object of the poem” (D 1968: 173). The objectified poem is designed to be not just a recognizable...