This thesis is the first book-length treatment of the poems in George Oppen's Discrete Series (1934), providing a counterbalance to critical readings of Oppen's work which have to date focused on work published after his return to poetry (i.e. from 1962 onwards). It is a philosophical presentation of the work which argues that the poems are themselves philosophical presentations of objects, and by those objects and that presentation, of the historical circumstances of those objects and the poems themselves. Its method is Adornian in three senses: first, it holds that literature is not only subject-matter for a (sub)subset of philosophy but a potential mode of participation within it; second, the philosophical writing with which the thesis puts the poems into dialogue is not a single authorship nor strictly aesthetic, but a broad range of writings by Kant, Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche (with a special emphasis on Hegel); and third, continual recourse is made to Adorno's own writings on art and objecthood. After a brief account of the pre-history of Objectivism, of Oppen's connection with Ezra Pound, and the circumstances of the work's production and appearance, the poems are analysed in depth alongside more thoroughly institutionally validated works by, among others, Pound and T.S. Eliot. The main focus of these readings is on the physical objects represented: their nature, type, consistency, and the fact and manner of their presentation. These objects are characterised by their resolute materiality – their distinctive hardness and their uniform impenetrable surfaces. These properties are analysed from literary-historical, historical and philosophical perspectives, i.e. in the contexts of modernist hardness and its precursors; industrial production and the individual; and the causes and consequences, in thought, of the experience of bare materiality that the poems present. Finally it considers how the poems, as well as registering a particular mode of object experience, themselves seek to produce it.

This thesis examines womens' poetry of the radical Left and organised labour movement of the Depression-Era United States and investigates the relationship between poetry and politics during this period. In so doing, it shows that women poets were concerned with precisely that problem: of poetry's political function. The work of individual poets and the acts of collective cultural production explored in this thesis articulate a radical, politically transformative poetics at a time when the continued existence of poetry was perceived to be under threat from scientific advance and wider cultural changes. Juxtaposing analysis of Left modernist poets with poets of the labour movement, the chapters focus on three individual poets including Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980), Genevieve Taggard (1894-1948) and Miriam Tane (1916-2007). To provide an understanding of the role of poetry within a specific political movement and to establish the context in which Tane's poetry was produced, two chapters are included which analyse the educational culture and the collective cultural production of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union. One chapter focuses on the history of the ILGWU's educational and cultural activities and the other analyses collections of poetry which the union produced. This thesis challenges the existing paradigm in which the study of American radical Left and labour poetry has been isolated from any broader enquiry about its relationship to class, American political history and also to literary modernism. This thesis advances two main arguments: that the poets considered in this thesis conceived of poetry as a politically transformative force; that these politically transformative understandings of poetry were rooted in in an engagement with the ideological and material contexts of the social movements to which these writers belonged. Furthermore, this thesis considers poetry in terms of the material context of its publication, and the political uses to which it was put.