SOURCE: “In the Realm of the Naked Eye: The Poetry of Paul Auster,” in Beyond the Red Notebook: Essays on Paul Auster, edited by Dennis Barone, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995, pp. 52-56.

In the following excerpt from a study of writer/poet Paul Auster, Finkelstein examines the Objectivists’, and especially Oppen's, importance to Auster's poetics and worldview.

If Paul Auster's work were concerned only with the past or with the flickering self, it would not have achieved the tensile strength and jagged expressivity that mark it as among the best American writing of the last twenty years. In poetry especially, a concern solely for tradition or solely for the vicissitudes of the ego will severely limit a writer's range of expression. Even when such concerns are simply combined—as in the case of Robert Lowell, for example—one can expect only limited success. “Its past was a souvenir...