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Charles Olson Reconsidered

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

J. B. Philip
J. B. Philip
Affiliation:
University of Essex
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Extract

My major concern in this essay is with the poetry and prose of Charles Olson. However, I wish to approach his work by way of comments passed upon it by both Gabriel Pearson and Martin Dodsworth in a recent critical anthology, edited by the latter, and entitled The Survival of Poetry. In the course of an essay on Robert Lowell, Mr Pearson mounts an attack on what he takes to be Olson's characteristic position, and many of the points that he makes are echoed by the editor in his introductory remarks. It will be my concern to show that neither of these critics deals justly with the scope of Olson's work, or with the vision of man in America that we find in it. Attention in England had been focused almost exclusively on the manifesto ‘Projective Verse’. However, we now have enough texts available to us to be able to set that single work in a wider context, and this is the task that must be achieved if Olson's work is not to suffer the premature dismissal that these critics seem eager to mete out to it. In his essay,‘The Black Mountain Poets’, in the same book, Donald Davie begins this work, but there is much more to be done.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 5 , Issue 3 , December 1971, pp. 293 - 305
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1971

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References

1 The Survival of Poetry, A Contemporary Survey, edited by Dodsworth, Martin (London: Faber and Faber, 1970)Google Scholar. All further references to this volume are given as page numbers in the text.

2 Reprinted in Human Universe & Other Essays (New York: Grove Press Inc., 1967).

3 Call Me Ishmael (London: Cape Editions, Jonathan Cape, 1967), p. 19. Published in the U.S. by Grove Press, 1959.

4 The Maximus Poems (New York: Jargon/Corinth Books, 1960), p. 135. Published in England by Cape Goliard.

5 The Maximus Poems, p. 101.

6 Human Universe & Other Essays, p. 60.

7 The Special View of History (Berkeley: Oyez Press, 1970), p. 30.

8 Call Me Ishmael, p. 57.

9 Maximus Poems IV, V, VI (London: Cape Goliard Press, 1968), p. 14. Reprinted by permission of the Estate of Charles Olson, the publishers, and Grossman Publishers, New York.

10 Human Universe & Other Essays, p. 4. Olson's views on the Greek philosophers owe much to his close reading of the work of Whitehead, A. N., particularly Process and Reality.Google Scholar

11 Human Universe & Other Essays, p. 20.

12 The Special View of History, p. 25.

13 The Maximus Poems, p. 22.

14 The Maximus Poems, p. 28.

15 The Maximus Poems, p. 13.

16 The Maximus Poems, p. 10.

17 See Olson's use of these particular words in The Maximus Poems, p. 28.

18 The Maximus Poems, p. 25.

19 The Maximus Poems IV, V, VI, p. 79.