SOURCE: “Notes on George Oppen's Seascape: Needle's Eye,” in George Oppen: Man and Poet, edited by Burton Hatlen, National Poetry Foundation, Inc., 1981, pp. 407-12.

In the following essay, originally published in 1973, Davie considers Oppen's poems on their own merit rather than as representative of a particular movement or tradition.

For us to come to terms with Oppen, the time has long gone by—if it ever existed—when it was useful to start plotting his place in a scheme of alternative or successive poetic “schools” or “traditions.” Imagism, objectivism, constructivism, objectism: if there was ever any point in shoving those counters about, that time is long gone by. At present, that sort of categorizing only ducks the challenge that the poems throw down: the way of living, and of thinking about living, which they propose to us.

Oppen is not at all a representative American poet. Not only...