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George Oppen in exile: Mexico and Maritain

journal contribution
posted on 2023-06-08, 05:06 authored by Peter Nicholls
In 1960, George Oppen and his wife Mary settled in New York City after a period of nine years of political exile in Mexico. Oppen was the author of a slim volume of poems entitled Discrete Series, published back in 1934 with a then highly desirable preface by Ezra Pound. Few of Oppen's contemporaries, however, would remember him now as a poet, and back in New York he was having to reckon with what he would term in a later interview “my rejection of poetry for twenty or twenty-five years.”. For only at the end of the fifties, at the very end of the period spent in Mexico, had Oppen begun to write again. Success would come to him later in the decade, with the award of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, but, for the time being, as Oppen observed of the rather similar case of Basil Bunting, he felt as if he had returned to poetry “as from the dead.” Dedication: for Linda Oppen

History

Publication status

  • Published

Journal

Journal of American Studies

ISSN

0021-8758

Publisher

Cambridge University Press

Volume

39

Page range

1 - 18

Pages

19.0

Department affiliated with

  • English Publications

Notes

Won the Arthur Miller Prize for best article in American Studies.

Full text available

  • No

Peer reviewed?

  • Yes

Legacy Posted Date

2012-02-06

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