SOURCE: “Individuality and Numerosity,” in The Nation, New York, Vol. 209, No. 18, November 24, 1969, pp. 574-76.

In the following review of Of Being Numerous, Dembo illustrates his assessment of Oppen as “a poet of the first order” by selected textual explications.

When George Oppen stopped writing poetry in the mid-1930s, he had behind him only a small volume of imagistic poems, hardly enough to mark him for the stature he has achieved today. His efflorescence, after twenty-five years of silence, is remarkable. It would be irrelevant to speculate on what Oppen might have done had he been writing steadily just as it would be sentimental to lament his silence. The four volumes that he has completed are in themselves an impressive contribution to American poetry.

There is nothing in his first volume, Discrete Series, to suggest that Oppen's social consciousness was strong enough to lead him to abandon poetry...