[While] the poems in "Primitive" are charged, as befits a man writing in his 70's, with the meaning of being a poet, they are also perhaps Mr. Oppen's most public and visionary poems. They are poems that … are a keeping of faith, an almost Whitmanesque faith, with the sources of his poetry:

                 … I am
                 of that people the grass
 
                 blades touch
 
                 and touch in their small
 
                 distances the poem
                 begins

They are at once celebratory and elegiac; even as they affirm kinship ("I dreamed myself of their people …") they probe loss, often speaking of something failed or incomplete, reminders of how much of Whitman's hopes remain unfulfilled. The lines intense, painful and declamatory have that unique tone that is Mr. Oppen's main contribtion to our poetry:

     … young workmen's
     loneliness on the structures has touched
     and    touched    the    heavy    tools    tools
     in our hands in the clamorous
     country birth-...