Speaking the Estranged: Essays on the Work of George Oppen (Expanded Edition)

Author: Michael Heller

Publisher: Shearsman Books—Revised Edition (2012)

This expanded edition of Speaking the Estranged brings together Michael Heller's writings on the work of George Oppen (1908–1984), one of America's most remarkable and distinguished poets. Heller's essays, written over the last twenty years since his groundbreaking book on the Objectivist poets, Conviction's Net of Branches, cover all of Oppen's poetry and how other poets and critics have read him. They touch on all phases of his career, from his early roots in the Objectivist tradition to his abandonment of poetry for political and social activism in the nineteen thirties and his coming back to poetry in the nineteen fifties. Oppen's work won the Pulitzer Prize in 1968, and is considered by many to be one of the most extraordinary and original bodies of poetry in the twentieth century.