Culture

I Swear This Poem Didn’t Make Me Cry

Published

1 year ago

January 24, 2025

Poems aren’t pictures, but sometimes they try to make us see, and to make us feel in ways we might associate with acts of seeing. Some poems evoke the drama of famous paintings or the frozen beauty of Grecian urns. This one dwells on a more private image, a family snapshot, and on the elusive emotions and memories that live inside it.

And there is a real picture.

George Oppen and his daughter, Linda.

Mary Oppen, via New Directions

Who are we looking at? This candid photo of George Oppen and his daughter, Linda, was taken in the early 1940s, many years before “From a Photograph” was written, at a time when Oppen was a former and future poet. Is that an apple in Linda’s hand? It’s hard to tell. Maybe the fruit was a metaphor all along.

In the early 1930s, as part of a cluster of poets who called themselves Objectivists, Oppen published a formally ambitious book (“Discrete Series”) and tried to run a small publishing house. Then in 1934 he stopped writing altogether, a hiatus that would last a quarter century. In that time, he worked as a tool-and-die maker, a furniture designer and a labor organizer; he fought in World War II; and, with his family, he lived in Mexico as a political exile during the McCarthy era. In 1958, the Oppens returned to the United States and George returned to poetry.

None of that information is, strictly speaking, relevant to this poem. One of the reasons Oppen gave up poetry was to keep politics out of it. His aesthetic allegiances made him wary of personal confession. Objectivism (which had nothing to do with Ayn Rand’s political philosophy) was an aesthetic grounded not in psychology or sentiment but in a cleareyed reckoning with the material facts of the world.

A photograph, though, is a special kind of object. It’s made — the old, predigital kind, anyway — of paper and silver emulsion, and also of less tangible substances: light; time; memory; love.

We’re looking at a family portrait. It isn’t a selfie. Someone is behind the camera, a person whose presence quietly suffuses the poem.

That would be Mary Oppen.

Mary and George Oppen in 1928.

George Oppen Sr., via New Directions

She and George met at Oregon State University in 1926. On their first date, they stayed out all night, which got them both kicked out of school. They would be together for the next 58 years, until George’s death in 1984. Linda was their only surviving child, born in 1940, after the Oppens had endured a series of stillbirths and a crib death.

In 1978, Mary published “Meaning a Life,” a memoir about the collaborative work of their couplehood — as artists, as activists, as parents. “From a Photograph” is an artifact of that collaboration and a tribute to its power.

According to an old friend of theirs, George and Mary once had a pair of binoculars that they cut in half, so that they could look at the same thing at the same time. Of course such perfect symmetry of vision isn’t really possible, but it is present in this poem as an ideal of creativity: The poem, like the child, is something the two of them made together.

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Culture

Try This Quiz on Oscar-Winning Adaptations of Popular Books

Published

7 days ago

January 26, 2026

Press Room

Try This Quiz on Oscar-Winning Adaptations of Popular Books

Welcome to Great Adaptations, the Book Review’s regular multiple-choice quiz about works that have gone on to find new life as movies, television shows, theatrical productions — or even books. With the Academy Award nominations announced last week, this week’s challenge celebrates past Oscar-winning films that were based on books. Just tap or click your answers to the five questions below. And scroll down after you finish the last question for links to the books and their filmed versions.

Culture

What Kind of Lover Are You? This William Blake Poem Might Have the Answer.

Published

2 weeks ago

January 16, 2026

Press Room

What Kind of Lover Are You? This William Blake Poem Might Have the Answer.

By A.O. Scott and Aliza Aufrichtig

A.O. Scott is a critic at large for the Book Review. Aliza Aufrichtig is a visual journalist.

Jan. 16, 2026

Not every poem about love is a love poem. This one, from William Blake’s “Songs of Innocence and of Experience,” first published in 1794, is more analytical than romantic. Instead of roses and violets, it offers us dirt and rocks.

William Blake (1757-1827), obscure in his own time and a hero to later generations of poets and spiritual seekers, made his living as an engraver and illustrator. He conceived and executed many of his poetic projects as works of visual as well as literary art, etching his verses and images onto copper plates and printing them in vivid color — a style designed to blur the boundary between word and picture.

From a 1795 copy of William Blake’s “Songs of Innocence and of Experience.”

The Trustees of the British Museum

“The Clod & the Pebble” is set in a rustic tableau populated by wild and domesticated animals. In the print, we can’t quite see the main characters, who are presumably somewhere beneath the hooves and the ripples. But the cows and sheep, the frogs and the duck, are nonetheless connected to the poem’s meaning.

The two sections of “Songs of Innocence and of Experience” are meant to illustrate “the contrary states of the human soul” — the purity and wonder associated with early childhood and the harder knowledge that inevitably follows.

“The Clod & the Pebble” recapitulates this fall from sweetness into disillusionment, and the plate suggests it in contrasting ways. The wild animals down below symbolize a natural condition of innocence, while the livestock above live in confinement, bound to another’s use. At the same time, though, the cows and sheep are peaceful ruminants, while the frogs and the duck are predators.

In the poem, the Clod is an avatar of innocence. As it happens, this is a recurring character in the Blakean poetic universe. In “The Book of Thel,” a fantastical meditation composed a few years before the publication of “Songs of Innocence and of Experience,” the Clod appears as a maternal figure selflessly nursing a baby worm:

The Clod of Clay heard the Worms voice, & raisd her pitying head;

She bow’d over the weeping infant, and her life exhal’d

In milky fondness

“We live not for ourselves,” she tells the poem’s heroine, a young girl named Thel. But in Blake’s system self-sacrifice can never be the last word. There is no innocence without the fall into experience, and no experience without the memory of innocence. Giving gives way to wanting.

Want to learn this poem by heart? We’ll help.

Get to know the poem better by filling in the missing words below.

Question 1/6

First, the Clod’s perspective.

Love seeketh not Itself to please,

Nor for itself hath any care;

Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.

Culture

Try This Quiz on Myths and Stories That Inspired Recent Books

Published

3 weeks ago

January 12, 2026

Press Room

Try This Quiz on Myths and Stories That Inspired Recent Books

Welcome to Lit Trivia, the Book Review’s regular quiz about books, authors and literary culture. This week’s challenge tests your memory of 21st-century books that were inspired by ancient myths, legends and folk tales. In the five multiple-choice questions below, tap or click on the answer you think is correct. After the last question, you’ll find links to the books if you’d like to do further reading.