Saying Obligation: George Oppen's Poetry and Levinasian Ethics

Abstract

Because of his work in the 1930s with tenant and labour organizations and his lyrical critique of the consequences of modern technological progress, George Oppen and his poetry have always been labelled as uniquely “moral” or “ethical” by his closest readers and critics. Poems such as The Materials (1962) and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Of Being Numerous (1968) minimalistically present us with the social and material reality of markedly twentieth-century issues: urban experience, nuclear apocalypse, and the persistence of poverty amid wide-spread wealth, just to name a few. And this thematic concern with ethical issues has been one of the main impetuses behind many of the studies of Oppen's ethics.