New Collected Poems by George Oppen
Published 2012 · 105,600 words · about 10 hours at an average pace
How hard is New Collected Poems to read?
New Collected Poems scores 66 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 55 out of 100
- Plain words used with extreme deliberation.
- Sentence structure: 68 out of 100
- Fractured lines with the syntax deliberately suspended.
- Abstraction: 82 out of 100
- Being, ethics and the political handled at high abstraction.
- Information density: 72 out of 100
- Extreme compression; the white space carries meaning.
- Narrative indirection: 55 out of 100
- A speaking voice that resists coherence on principle.
- Symbolic density: 72 out of 100
- Ordinary objects carry philosophical weight throughout.
- Ironic distance: 45 out of 100
- Little irony; the difficulty is sincerity pushed to its limit.
- Resolution withholding: 82 out of 100
- The poems refuse closure as a matter of poetics.
- Structural complexity: 68 out of 100
- Serial poems that resist being read as sequences.
How New Collected Poems is regarded
New Collected Poems holds a literary regard score of 69 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.