Language Made Fluid: The Grammetrics of George Oppen's Recent Poetry

Since Seascape: Needle's Eye (1972), George Oppen's verse has been characterized by certain features of syntax, punctuation, lineation, and line-grouping that combine to make construal difficult and to make the texts open to diverse syntactic interpretations in a way they could not be with complete sentences, conventional punctuation, and metrical divisions in accord with syntactical boundaries. The features in question are, briefly: frequent use of fragments; almost complete absence of conventional punctuation and capitalization; frequent intralinear syntactic boundaries together with frequent enjambment, including enjambment of the final lines of line-groups, these last two features combining to undermine and submerge both line and line-group as units. It will be helpful in investigating the operation of these features to consider them especially in their interrelation, in accord with the notion of "grammetrical patterns" developed and applied by Roger Fowler and others in Fowler's 1966 collection, Essays on Style and Language, and employed by Donald Wesling in his 1971 study of "The Prosodies of Free Verse."' I agree with Charles O. Hartman that the relation or "counterpoint" of two elements, such as syntax and lineation, can of itself constitute a prosody,2 and with Alan Golding that