George Oppen Quotes & Sayings

Clarity, clarity, surely clarity is the most beautiful thing in the world, A limited, limiting clarity I have not and never did have any motive of poetry But to achieve clarity. — George Oppen

A discrete series is a series of terms each of which is empirically derived, each one of which is empirically true. And this is the reason for the fragmentary character of those poems. — George Oppen

It is necessary to study these words you have written, for the words have a longer history than you have and say more than you know. — George Oppen

In these explanations it is presumed that an experiencing subject is one occasion of a sensitive reaction to an actual world.'

the rain falls
that had not been falling
and it is the same world — George Oppen

The self is no mystery, the mystery is / That there is something for us to stand on — George Oppen

Only one mistake, Ezra! You should have talked to women. — George Oppen

Among days// Having only the force/ Of days//Most simple/ Most difficult — George Oppen

What I like more than anything is to visit other islands... — George Oppen

Boy's Room"

A friend saw the rooms
Of Keats and Shelley
At the lake, and saw 'they were just
Boys' rooms' and was moved

By that. And indeed a poet's room
Is a boy's room
And I suppose that women know it.

Perhaps the unbeautiful banker
Is exciting to a woman, a man
Not a boy gasping
For breath over a girl's body — George Oppen

When the hammer strikes a nail, the extreme force of the blow on the broad head is transmitted without loss to the point. The head of the nail is the whole of eternity and the point of that nail is pressed to the center of the human heart. " [ quoting Simone Weil from memory ] — George Oppen

I think there is no light in the world
but the world

and I think there is light — George Oppen

Things explain each other, not themselves. — George Oppen

The meaning of a poem is in the cadences and the shape of the lines and the pulse of the thought which is given by those lines. — George Oppen

Those who are not very concerned with art want poems or pictures to record for them something they already know - as one might want a picture of a place he loves. — George Oppen

Ultimately the air
Is bare sunlight where must be found
The lyric valuable. — George Oppen

The first question at that time in poetry was simply the question of honesty, of sincerity. — George Oppen

Truth, also is the pursuit of it. — George Oppen

There are situations which cannot honorably be met by art. — George Oppen

A pure mathematical series would be one in which each term is derived from the preceding term by a rule. — George Oppen

The situation of the Old Left was the theory of Socialist Realism, etc. It seemed pointless to argue. We stayed carefully away from people who wrote for the New Masses. — George Oppen

[It is not] the poet's business to use verse as an advanced form of rhetoric, nor to give to political statements the aura of eternal truth. — George Oppen