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Authors
Charles Olson (1910-1970)
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The best single introduction to Olson is Robert Creeley’s Selected Writings of Charles Olson (1967). A complete edition of The Maximus Poems, edited by George F. Butterick, appeared in 1983. The Collected Poems, edited by George Butterick, appeared in 1987. Among Olson’s many prose works are his study of Melville, Call Me Ishmael (1947); Mayan Letters (1953); and a two-volume collection of his lectures and interviews, Mathologos (1976–79), edited by George F. Butterick. An edition of Olson’s Collected Prose, edited by Donald Allen, appeared in 1997. The seven volumes of Charles Olson and Robert Creeley: The Complete Correspondence (1980–86), edited by Butterick, provide as extensive a discussion of life and poetry as we are ever likely to see. Among the critical studies of Olson’s poetry, some of the most useful are Ed Dorn’s What I See in the Maximus Poems (1960), Sherman Paul’s Olson’s Push (1978), Robert von Hallberg’s Charles Olson: The Scholar’s Art (1978), and Stephen Fredman’s The Grounding of American Poetry: Charles Olson and the Emersonian Tradition (1993). For any reader of the Maximus Poems, Butterick’s A Guide to the Maximus Poems (1981) is indispensable. Various “Charles Olson Issues” appeared in the journal Boundary 2 (1973–74).
Raised in Gloucester, Massachusetts, in a neighborhood called "Dogtown," Charles Olson was, as he put it, "uneducated" at Wesleyan, Yale, and Harvard, where he received an advanced degree in American civilization. As first a teacher, then a rector at Black Mountain College, Olson was a leading influence for poets such as Denise Levertov, Robert Duncan, and Robert Creeley, with whom he enjoyed a substantial correspondence. As an anthropologist, he explored the Mayan ruins in the Yucatán and carried over his critical approach to his poetry: Olson searched for the primitive energies that were the foundations of ancient cultures and located them in contemporary society, reflecting on how they undergird modern life. In his Maximus poems, which he worked on throughout his life, Olson considered the racial and geographical legacies left to him by his parents and his boyhood home, weighing their significance in his quest to become whole. His poetic line is governed by the length of breath, not meter, and his words are arranged on the printed page to suggest rhythm, gestures, and energy. Olson's volumes of poetry include The Maximus Poems (1983) and The Collected Poems (1987). His prose publications include Call Me Ishmael (1947), a study of Herman Melville, and Mathologos (1976-79), a two-volume collection of his lectures and interviews.
Questions for Discussion and Writing
In experimental American verse since 1955, Charles Olson and Robert Creeley are often thought of as a pair. They corresponded vigorously for years about poetry; they taught together at Black Mountain; and they both affirmed a poetry of great freedom, in which form would grow naturally from meaning, from the language of the utterance, and from the self. Out of these shared values, the poems of Olson and Creeley evolved in different directions. Looking at their work comparatively, we can learn more about the tradition of "anti-tradition" and the individual talent.
1. Read carefully the Creeley poems For Love (1962) and Fathers (1986) and the Olson poems Maximus, to Himself (1953) and Celestial Evening, October 1967 (1975).You will notice that in each of these poems, there are sentences which are long or unended and arrangements of words which are difficult to sort out grammatically. What is the effect of these long, difficult, open strings? Is that effect different from one Creeley poem to another? From one Olson poem to the other? Or from the Creeley poems to the Olson poems?
2. A long-standing debate about Walt Whitman's Song of Myself has to do with whether the "I" of that poem transcends the individual ego, becomes more than "Walt Whitman," becomes disembodied and universal. What about the "Maximus" in these selected Maximus Poems? What of the "I" in the Creeley poems? Do they achieve some measure of escape from the ego? If so, where, how, and to what extent?
3. In Creeley's The Door (1959) and Olson's Where Do Poppies Bloom (1975), we see verse in arrangements which suggest traditional forms. The Door makes interesting, erratic use of repetition and even of rhyme; and Where Do Poppies Bloom is written in sprung pentameters and hexameters. Why might these poems have a more "formal" shape than others in the NAAL selections from these two poets? What themes in each poem might resonate with or find strong expression in these forms?
