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Although George Oppen once claimed that "Whitman has been no use to me," a review of Oppen's poetry, letters, daybooks, and interviews reveals that Whitman was central to Oppen's poetics and to his most celebrated poem, "Of Being Numerous." Using archival materials and recently published interviews, this essay provides a comprehensive overview of Oppen's engagement with Whitman, highlighting the sophistication and complexity of his response and addressing what Oppen meant when he described the conclusion to "Of Being Numerous" as in part "a joke on Whitman." Using him variously as foil, icon, compatriot, and source text, Oppen presents a version of Whitman at odds with both the critical responses of previous modernists and the more enthusiastic interpretations of Oppen's contemporaries in the 1950s and 1960s.
In the summer of 1960, George Oppen (1908-84) remarked in a letter to his friend William Carlos Williams (1883-1963), "People who are afraid to talk won't produce much poetry. Tho Whitman has been no use to me" (Selected Letters 38-39). His comment recalls something Whitman (1819-92) said in a letter to one of his friends, William Sloane Kennedy (1850-1929), in 1887: "It is of no importance whether I had read [Ralph Waldo] Emerson [1803-82] before starting L. of G. [Leaves of Grass (1855)] or not. The fact happens to be positively that I had not" (Correspondence IV 69). Taken in isolation, both statements are misleading (if not outright lies), though the date and context of Oppen's letter leaves open the possibility that he was referring to his early career, prior to his long hiatus from poetry, which began in 1935. When Oppen returned to writing poems in 1958, he soon found a use for Whitman. One of the first poems Oppen wrote upon returning, "Myself I Sing," published in the January 1960 issue of Poetry, portrays Whitman as a kind of poetic foil for Oppen's more sober regard for working-class Americans. The book in which this poem was collected, The Materials (1962), reveals a sophisticated engagement with Whitman, stressing Whitman's materialist aesthetics and linguistic theories. Oppen's response intensified in his best-known and most widely celebrated work, "Of Being Numerous" (the title poem of Of Being Numerous [1968]), which responds directly to "Song of Myself" (1855). Here, Oppen portrays a...