We have to live today by what truth we can get today, and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood. — William James
When we consider George Oppen’s post-1958, post-silence poetry through the prism of his politics, it is crucial that we consider his continued belief in Marxism as a political solution. Oppen’s interest in and later disavowal of Maoism as an experiment in large-scale Marxism inspired his 1960s poetry to interrogate the needs of the people and the sincerity of leftist political movements in addressing those needs in any significant way. That a poem can interrogate political beliefs in such a way is in concert with Oppen’s then-newfound conviction that it is possible for the poet to reconcile artistic and political concerns, much as he was attempting to accomplish in his own poetry at that time.
There are fruitful literary quarrels and their opposite. For while the big, personal rift that opened up between Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov exemplifies the latter — when he complained that the subjugation of her poetry to the cause of political activism was creatively damaging — George Oppen’s earlier argument with Levertov was markedly beneficial. It was the means by which he defined a poetic way forward in the 1960s, having known long before, as a Communist social worker during the Depression, the necessity of not politicizing his art.
Left to right: Marjorie Perloff, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Plato.
Early on in her 1996 study of “Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary,” a book entitled Wittgenstein’s Ladder,Marjorie Perloff puts forward the thesis — one which has circulated widely — that Wittgenstein wrote “‘philosophy’ as if it were ‘poetry.’”[1] Both “philosophy” and “poetry” appear in quotation marks, giving us to understand that a certain metaphorical grammar may be at work here, although equally it may be the very literality of these terms that Perloff wishes to insist upon, in order in some sense to “undo.” In evoking this proximity of poetry to philosophy, even by way of an analogy — of an analogical writing — Perloff calls to mind, without naming,[2] the figure (we might say spectre) of a form of “poetry” that writes as philosophy; which negates itself (as poetry) in a moment of zealous assertion of its truth (as philosophy). Perloff’s implied interlocutor here is the Plato of TheRepublic. In the background of Perloff’s discussion of Wittgenstein, of “poetic language,” and of “estrangement,” the three books of the Republic dealing with the exclusion of “poetry” from the ideal polis — in fact its interdiction — evoke the ambi-violence of a type of primal scene: on the one hand describing a castration-effect of language under the dominion of the philosophic Signified, and on the other describing the locus of a return of the philosophical “repressed,” its Unheimlich, its strangely resemblant yet disconcerting and innately threatening other.
