George Oppen

The poet George Oppen was born into a wealthy family of German Jewish descent in New Rochelle, New York. After his mother’s suicide in 1918, the family moved to San Francisco. Oppen’s poetry appeared alongside that of Carl Rakosi, Charles Reznikoff, and Louis Zukofsky in the 1931 “Objectivists” issue of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse. He later founded the Objectivist Press with Reznikoff and Zukofsky. “Psalm” demonstrates Oppen’s belief that poetry should depict concrete objects and achieve the status of an object for itself. With his wife, Mary, he joined the Communist Party in 1935. Despite having earned a Purple Heart for his service in World War II, he fled to Mexico to escape the McCarthy hearings and FBI investigations from 1950 to 1958. After he had not written nor published more than minimally for more than twenty years, Oppen was widely celebrated when he returned to writing verse in the 1960s. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1969.