quiet americans Within the experimental modernist tradition, it is the Americans who, after 1945,
seemmore able to meet the Wordsworthian understanding of the poet’s role, and
who can marry poetry and reportage. The work of George Oppen, for instance,
owes a great deal to the innovations of Pound and William Carlos Williams. A
communist activist during the 1930s, Oppen was awarded a Purple Heart for his
military service in the Second World War, and his life and career have some striking
parallels with those of the English poet Basil Bunting. In one of his greatest poems,
the fourteen-part sequence ‘Route’ (1968),^10 Oppen tells exactly the kind of story
about the experience of war that Adorno feels ought to be impossible; he repeatedly
tells us that ‘all this is reportage’; and he conspicuously casts the poet as an earnest
but baffled conversationalist (‘One man could not understand me because I was
saying simple things; it seemed to him that nothing was being said’). The story itself
is like the kind of story Walter Benjamin might have cited in his essay on Nikolai
Leskov, and concerns the dilemma of the French in Alsace during the occupation:
Pierre told me of a man who, receiving the notification that he was to report to the German
army, called a celebration and farewell at his home. Nothing was said at that party that was
not jovial. They drank and sang. At the proper time, the host got his bicycle and waved
goodbye. The house stood at the top of a hill and, still waving and calling farewells, he rode
with great energy and as fast as he could downthe hill, and, at the bottom, drove into a tree.
The point is that the story Oppen tells, which is a story that was told to him, is so
morally and experientially fraught that it can be told only as a story: any attempt
to break off from it, in order to arrive at a moral, would detract from its simplicity
and its complexity.
Another American poet at work in the 1960s, whose allegiances were also
experimental (to Whitman and Melville), who was prepared to say what Oppen
calls ‘simple things’, at the risk of being misunderstood, was Muriel Rukeyser,
author of one of the most succinct testimonies of the twentieth century:
I lived in the first century of world wars.
Most mornings I would be more or less insane,
The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories,
The news would pour out of various devices
Interrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen.
I would call my friends on other devices;
They would be more or less mad for similar reasons.^11This is breath-taking, simply, in its uninhibited summoning of the century;
exhilarating in its economical rendition of one’s impotent subjection to what had
become, by 1968, the same old same old. As Oppen wrote: ‘—They await|War,
(^10) Oppen, ‘Route’, inNew Collected Poems, 192–202.
(^11) Muriel Rukeyser, ‘Poem’ (1968), inThe Collected Poems, ed. Janet E. Kaufman and Anne F.
Herzog, with Jan Heller Levi (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005), 430.