![]() | Being Numerous: Poetry and the Ground of Social Life "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. Oren Izenberg is a visiting scholar at the University of Illinois, Chicago. |
![hidden image for function call](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ca/1x1.png)