SOURCE: “Of Being Ethical: Reflections on George Oppen,” in Journal of American Studies, Vol. 31, No. 2, August, 1997, pp. 153-70.

In the following essay, Nicholls explores the meaning of “ethical” when applied to a state of “being-between” which Oppen's career and his poems both suggest he occupied.

The poems of George Oppen continue to occupy a marginal place in most literary histories, even though his work encapsulates some of the major shifts in American writing between high modernism and contemporary Language poetry. In part this marginalization is due to the habit of tying Oppen to Louis Zukofsky's shortlived “Objectivist” tendency of the thirties. Oppen did indeed publish his first collection, Discrete Series, in 1934, and with a strong endorsement from Ezra Pound (“I salute a serious craftsman, a sensibility which is not every man's sensibility and which has not been got out of any other man's books”).¹ Yet after this propitious...