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This chapter examines the long silence at the center of George Oppen's poetic career, arguing that it was driven in part by his early choice of left-political activism over art. After the 1934 publication of his Discrete Series, Oppen stopped writing poems and lived, starting in 1950, as a “known subversive” in Mexico. He would resurface in 1962 with the publication of The Materials. Focusing on the figure of Robinson Crusoe, this chapter offers an account of Oppen's poetic knowledge in relation to aesthetics and to the idea of a poetic politics. It also considers Oppen's reconceptualization of what it means “to know” and its relevance to the question of social recognition. It suggests that Oppen's return to poetry was contingent upon his conceptualization of the rigorous charity of his silence and his discovery of a way to make such silence audible.

This chapter examines the section on poetic morals, economy, and politics in the New Science. Morals, economy, and politics fall within the scope of Aristotle’s epistēmēpraktikai or “practical” sciences. Morals or ethics pertains to choice in regard to individual actions and is concerned with character understood as the product of habit. Economy is the smallest unit of statecraft from which the nation arises. This chapter considers Giambattista Vico’s views on the morality of the first men, piety, marriage, and burial, as well as his principles of humanity. It also discusses poetic economy, poetic morals, and poetic politics in relation to a mythological canon that Vico articulates in terms of the pursuits that establish civil society. Finally, it explores Vico’s notion of divine and heroic history within the context of three epitomes or fables that convey a severe truth: the first is that of Cadmus, the second is from the Iliad, and the third is that of the shield of Achilles.

Chapter 3 focuses on patronage, passivity, and the politics of poetic reception in the mid-twentieth-century work of F.T. Prince. It examines the motives for his trans-historical engagement with Michelangelo’s sculpture and poetry, and allies the motifs of stasis and the statue that comes to life with the condition of being roused from (readerly) repose. Re-awakening his forebear’s material, Prince’s lyric forms are closely attuned to the politics and economics of the situated, commissioned (and compromised) cultural work, even as it emphasizes how the neglected statue, dormant artistic legacy, or underappreciated poem can be transformed in a new era, for a fresh audience. Chapter 3 both examines the negotiations at play in contemporary reactivations of earlier models of commission and reception, resistance and slumber, and considers the ethics of the quietly fugitive provocation in the twentieth-century poetry industry.