Of Being Numerous
by George Oppen
Summary
Of Being Numerous takes its title from its long title poem, a sequence that asks what it means for a single person to exist as one of many, inside a city, a nation, and a century whose worst events, Oppen suggests, may simply be too large for any poem to hold.
Oppen writes in the spare, stripped down lines of the Objectivist method he had helped found decades earlier, weighting individual words and the silences between them so heavily that a short poem can carry an argument other poets would need paragraphs to make. He returned to poetry only in 1958, after nearly a quarter century spent almost entirely away from it, first organizing labor and later working as a carpenter, years during which the Depression and the rise of fascism had convinced him that direct political action mattered more than verse. That long detour shows in the poem's caution about language itself: Oppen keeps circling back to doubt whether poetry can respond adequately to mass suffering at all, treating that doubt as part of the poem's actual subject rather than resolving it before the poem begins.
Reading the book means moving slowly through short, dense sections that ask to be reread rather than read through, closer to philosophical fragments than to narrative poems. It suits a reader interested in poetry that treats its own limits as a genuine subject, written by someone who had walked away from the art entirely once already and came back only when he found something he needed poetry, rather than politics, to say.
Historical Context & Significance
Of Being Numerous won the 1969 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, an unusual recognition for a poet who had published almost nothing between the early 1930s and 1962, when The Materials marked his return.
Oppen had spent the intervening decades organizing for the Communist Party and, fearing investigation by the House Un-American Activities Committee, living in Mexico from 1950 to 1958 before a dream he described to his wife's therapist helped draw him back to writing. The prize confirmed him as a central figure of the Objectivist poets, a group including Louis Zukofsky, Charles Reznikoff, and William Carlos Williams that Oppen had helped organize in New York decades before, and it drew new attention to Discrete Series, his 1934 debut, as a founding document of a style poets were still working from when Of Being Numerous appeared.