Quotes from 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.

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.

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.

Things explain each other, not themselves.

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

Truth, also is the pursuit of it.

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

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.

PossibleTo useWords provided one treat themAs enemies.

Imagine a man in the ditch,The wheels of the overturned wreckStill spinning—I don't mean he despairs, I mean if he does notHe sees in the manner of poetry

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.

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

We are pressed, pressed on each other,We will be told at onceOf anything that happens

For the people of that flowAre new, the oldNew to age as the youngTo youth

I know that no one would live outThirty years, fifty years if the world were endingWith his life.

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

Among days// Having only the force/ Of days//Most simple/ Most difficult

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

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

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

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

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 ]

There are things We live among 'and to see them Is to know ourselves'.

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