“다수로 존재하기”: 조지 오펜과 공적 공간으로서의 시

‘Of Being Numerous’: George Oppen’s Poetry as Public Space

This essay, as a part of a long-held project on the relationship between poetry and its public value, re-interprets Oppen’s “Of Being Numerous” as the voices echoing the communal value of poetry against the grain of modern poetry that has been attacked as being trapped in the over-indulgence of subjective ‘I’ in the lyric poetry. Revisiting “Of Being Numerous,” sequence poems composed of forty section in the poetry collection under the same title, this essay argues that Oppen’s approach to a dark world of the city New York leads readers to affirm a fundamental, partially knowable world as the space of the singular-plural beings in ‘sad wonder.’ His poetry, featuring its flows of clear and succinct language, stands as correlatives of our own everyday experience which will open up to us an intuition of seeing more clearly the mode of our beings in this world. “Of Being Numerous” is the pantheon of his poetry, a successful experiment of his poetic vision, in which we readers, of being singular and being numerous, can reach the communal ground beyond different temperaments through the gaze of ‘the first eyes.’