Being Numerous

Poetry and the Ground of Social Life

Oren Izenberg

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780691148663, 9780691144832
• eBook ISBN: 9781400836529
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Poetry
• Index: Literature

"Because I am not silent," George Oppen wrote, "the poems are bad." What does it mean for the goodness of an art to depend upon its disappearance? In Being Numerous, Oren Izenberg offers a new way to understand the divisions that organize twentieth-century poetry. He argues that the most important conflict is not between styles or aesthetic politics, but between poets who seek to preserve or produce the incommensurable particularity of experience by making powerful objects, and poets whose radical commitment to abstract personhood seems altogether incompatible with experience--and with poems.


Reading across the apparent gulf that separates traditional and avant-garde poets, Izenberg reveals the common philosophical urgency that lies behind diverse forms of poetic difficulty--from Yeats's esoteric symbolism and Oppen's minimalism and silence to O'Hara's joyful slightness and the Language poets' rejection of traditional aesthetic satisfactions. For these poets, what begins as a practical question about the conduct of literary life--what distinguishes a poet or group of poets?--ends up as an ontological inquiry about social life: What is a person and how is a community possible? In the face of the violence and dislocation of the twentieth century, these poets resist their will to mastery, shy away from the sensual richness of their strongest work, and undermine the particularity of their imaginative and moral visions--all in an effort to allow personhood itself to emerge as an undeniable fact making an unrefusable claim.

INDEX

acknowledgment, 20, 21, 49, 95, 98

Adorno, Theodor, 26, 195n43

Aesthetic Theory, 13

“On Lyric Poetry and Society,” 13

Aerial, 144

aesthetics, 1

and Anderson, 79

and Bourdieu, 125

and Language poetry, 142

and non-poetry, 11

and O’Hara, 37, 112, 113, 125, 126, 130, 133

and Oppen, 79–80, 84, 105, 106

political, 45

sensual pleasures of, 26

and Silliman, 141

and Yeats, 36. See also beauty

Afro-Modernism, 8

Agamben, Giorgio, 197n55

agency, 42, 43, 75, 170

and Language poetry, 142, 151

and Yeats, 50, 68

Alcmene’s Problem, 130–31

Allen, Donald, 116, 119, 125, 128

The New American Poetry 1945–1960, 6, 123, 124

Ammons, A. R.: Expressions of Sea Level, 171

Tape for the Turn of the Year, 171, 172–74, 175, 179–80, 183–84, 187

Amphion, 43

an-aesthesis, 140, 141, 161

anamnetic structure, 59

anamnetic technique, 49

Anderson, Benedict, 154

Anderson, Sherwood, 79

Andrews, Bruce, I Don’t Have any Paper, So Shut Up, or, Social Romanticism, 158

Anglo-Irish Ascendancy, 46, 55, 57, 202n19

Anglo-Irish Protestants, 57

Anzeichen, 30

Apollinaire, Guillaume, 117

Appadurai, Arjun, 169–70

Aquinas, Thomas, 99

archetype, 44, 63

Arendt, Hannah, The Life of the Mind, 3

aristocracy, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• 20/21
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction Poems, Poetry, Personhood
• Chpater One White Thin Bone: Yeatsian Personhood
• Chpater Two Oppen’s Silence, Crusoe’s Silence, and the Silence of Other Minds
• Chapter Three The Justice of My Feelings for Frank O’Hara
• Chapter Four Language Poetry and Collective Life
• Chapter Five We Are Reading
• Notes
• Index