18 Quotes by George Oppen

Poetry must be at leastas powerful as music, butI am not sure thatit is possible.

Once the singing wasand is

[It is not] the poet's business to use verse as an advanced form of rhetoric, nor to give to political statements the aura of eternal truth.

There are thingsWe live among ‘and to see themIs to know ourselves’.

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.

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.

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.

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