A Test of Poetry (Page 3)

For this reason, as Nicholls demonstrates, Oppen's poems rarely contain philosophical arguments, just as they rarely contain political arguments. The wonder of existence is registered not only in what Oppen's poems say--

In the small beauty of the forest
The wild deer bedding down--
That they are there!

--but in their manner of saying: rather than providing the evidence of completed thought, the poems disclose the process of thinking as it happens. Nicholls is more interested in Oppen as a thinker than as a poet, but he allows Oppen to be everything that he was, refusing--like Oppen himself--to ask poetry to shoulder responsibilities it cannot bear.

"I could not have continued as I was going with my early poems," says Oppen in the daybooks, looking back on his years of silence. "And we devoted ourselves to creating happiness for the three of us, and for a few friends and their children so far as possible." This unwillingness to exaggerate the importance of his actions--an eagerness to honor family life as much as any other social institution--is Oppen's signature. It may not be glamorous to suggest that Oppen stopped writing in large part to devote himself to his family, his friends and their children, but whatever else he was, Oppen was a man whose mother had shot herself when he was 4 years old. Half a century later, he could recite the suicide note from memory: "We've been happy--I love you--I worry about the children and school and their clothes--it seems--since I did this and don't know why--that I am not fitted for the business of life."

"Art [is] as old as civilization," says Oppen in the daybooks. "If one can add one thing to so long a history, one color or shape or tone, one perception to so long a history, that is a great deal to do." Here, in the concluding lines of "A Narrative," is the tone Oppen added to the history of poetry:

I thought I had encountered

Permanence; thought leaped on us in that sea
For in that sea we breathe the open
Miracle

Of place, and speak
If we would rescue
Love to the ice-lit

Upper World a substantial language
Of clarity, and of respect.

Oppen is thinking of Orpheus here, the poet who failed to rescue his love, the dead Eurydice, to the upper world. To test oneself, Oppen recognized, is to know failure. Oppen's victories are no less great for being small.

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