Open Oppen: linguistic fragmentation and the poetic proposition
Open Oppen: linguistic fragmentation and the poetic proposition
Discusses issues of semantics and intentionality arising from syntactic fragmentation in the later poetry of George Oppen. Oppen’s reception was initially uncertain despite his Pulitzer, and one reason was his apparent willingness to make unequivocal affirmations in propositional form. My discussion follows Peter Nicholls’s meticulous analysis of a poem from Seascape: Needle’s Eye, and takes up references to Hegel on the speculative proposition, as well as intertextual references to Wallace Stevens, and Robert Duncan. After brief discussions of the contrasting modes of poetic proposition in Wordsworth and Susan Howe, the essay concludes that modernist poetry’s visible disruptions of normative linguistic structures can be approached through a study of the role of the proposition in poetry.
623-648
Middleton, Peter
9f64f346-a05f-4e54-bbf4-600c87a2b237
2010
Middleton, Peter
9f64f346-a05f-4e54-bbf4-600c87a2b237
Middleton, Peter
(2010)
Open Oppen: linguistic fragmentation and the poetic proposition.
[in special issue: Thinking Poetry]
Textual Practice, 24 (4), .
(doi:10.1080/0950236X.2010.499649).
Abstract
Discusses issues of semantics and intentionality arising from syntactic fragmentation in the later poetry of George Oppen. Oppen’s reception was initially uncertain despite his Pulitzer, and one reason was his apparent willingness to make unequivocal affirmations in propositional form. My discussion follows Peter Nicholls’s meticulous analysis of a poem from Seascape: Needle’s Eye, and takes up references to Hegel on the speculative proposition, as well as intertextual references to Wallace Stevens, and Robert Duncan. After brief discussions of the contrasting modes of poetic proposition in Wordsworth and Susan Howe, the essay concludes that modernist poetry’s visible disruptions of normative linguistic structures can be approached through a study of the role of the proposition in poetry.
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e-pub ahead of print date: 1 October 2010
Published date: 2010
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English
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Local EPrints ID: 149735
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/149735
ISSN: 0950-236X
PURE UUID: 8abf2d6f-2fa5-4c9f-a3f2-4070b1701e29
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Date deposited: 05 May 2010 12:19
Last modified: 14 Mar 2024 01:11
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