ethical pressure

…George Oppen’s poetry is moment after moment in his work, line by line, syllable by syllable, you have a sense of an enormous ethical pressure brought to bear on the act of perception, and a sense that the ethical pressure of the act of perception is for him the same thing as the writing the poem.

—Robert Hass, “george oppen: his art,” What Light Can Do: Essays on Art, Imagination and the Natural World (Ecco, 2012)