SOURCE: “Oppen, Zukofsky, and the Poem as Lens,” in Literature at the Barricades: The American Writer in the 1930s, edited by Ralph F. Bogardus and Fred Hobson, The University of Alabama Press, 1982, pp. 162-71.

In the following essay, Kenner discusses the early Objectivist poetry of Oppen and Louis Zukovsky in relation to the socio-economic circumstances of the 1930's.

It was a bleak year, 1931, the breadlines hardly moving. “The world,” George Oppen wrote at about that time, “… the world, weather-swept, with which one shares the century.”¹ It was a world in which someone approaching the window “as if to see / what really was going on” saw rain falling. All of which seems easy, pictorial, the Pathetic Fallacy in fact: a rainy day as emblem for a rainy time. Oppen's poem, though, encloses the falling rain amid many syntactic qualifications, and our first sense of it is apt to be...