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.
