Background
Charles Olson, born in Worcester, Massachusetts, December 27, 1910.
( First published in 1947, this acknowledged classic of A...)
First published in 1947, this acknowledged classic of American literary criticism explores the influencesâespecially Shakespearean onesâon Melville's writing of Moby-Dick. One of the first Melvilleans to advance what has since become known as the "theory of the two Moby-Dicks," Olson argues that there were two versions of Moby-Dick, and that Melville's reading King Lear for the first time in between the first and second versions of the book had a profound impact on his conception of the saga: "the first book did not contain Ahab," writes Olson, and "it may not, except incidentally, have contained Moby-Dick." If literary critics and reviewers at the time responded with varying degrees of skepticism to the "theory of the two Moby-Dicks," it was the experimental style and organization of the book that generated the most controversy.
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(Literary Nonfiction. Poetics. Edited with an introduction...)
Literary Nonfiction. Poetics. Edited with an introduction by Kyle Schlesinger. Foreword by Basil King. In the spring of 1962, poet Charles Olson descended upon an experimental college in rural Vermont to read from The Maximus Poems and The Distances, and to lecture on Herman Melville. His captivating performance sparked lively debates with the audience on the nature of myth, history, etymology, narrative, knowledge, and sexuality. CHARLES OLSON AT GODDARD COLLEGE is an enthralling and indispensable annotated transcript that celebrates the intersection of Olson's poetics and a hopeful moment in American education.
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( Charles Olsons insistence that the public value of any...)
Charles Olsons insistence that the public value of any articulation is inseparable from the particulars of the time and place of its origins resulted in the proprioceptive methodology of his composition?in his speech and his writing, in both poetry and prose. Olson did not ?lecture?he ?talked. His encyclopedic knowledge of the subjects that interested him engaged in a manner always as surprising to himself as to his listeners. This element of discovery was to him a true measure of what is authentic in language, and it exhibits itself most in the impromptu exchanges of which Muthologos is mainly composed. Olson once de?ned ?Muthologos as ?what is said about what is said, which encompasses a breadth of discourse that would de?ne the near and far range of where the poets mind went in a lifetimes intent to go places. In this new compilation of Charles Olsons transcribed lectures and interviews, we ?nally get all of what is preserved of a life of talk, allowing Muthologos to stand, along with The Maximus Poems, Collected Poems, Collected Prose and Selected Letters as one of the ?standard texts of this great poets oeuvre. Ralph Mauds second edition of Muthologos, some thirty years after George Buttericks ?rst, adds several new items: ?At Goddard College, April 1962; a second Vancouver 1963 discussion, ?Duende, Muse, and Angel; a short addition to the ?BBC Interview; a second ?On Black Mountain; and a further hour of Olsons conversation with Herb Kenny. In addition, all the available tapes of these talks and interviews have been listened to again, and many of their previous transcription errors have been corrected. Textual notes to each piece identify these corrections, and also reveal the provenance of the tapes and the particular way in which each transcription was created.
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(Letters written during the spring and summer of 1951 conv...)
Letters written during the spring and summer of 1951 convey the artistic concerns of the two writers and share commentary on their poems and essays in progress.
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( "I have assumed a great deal in the selection of the po...)
"I have assumed a great deal in the selection of the poems from such a large and various number, making them a discourse unavoidably my own as well as any Olson himself might have chosen to offer. I had finally no advice but the long held habit of our using one another, during his life, to act as a measure, a bearing, an unabashed response to what either might write or say."Robert Creeley A seminal figure in post-World War II literature, Charles Olson has helped define the postmodern sensibility. His poetry embraces themes of empowering love, political responsibility, the wisdom of dreams, the intellect as a unit of energy, the restoration of the archaic, and the transformation of consciousnessall carried in a voice both intimate and grand, American and timeless, impassioned and coolly demanding. In this selection of some 70 poems, Robert Creeley has sought to present a personal reading of Charles Olson's decisive and inimitable work"unequivocal instances of his genius"over the many years of their friendship.
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( Praised by his contemporaries and emulated by his succe...)
Praised by his contemporaries and emulated by his successors, Charles Olson (1910-1970) was declared by William Carlos Williams to be "a major poet with a sweep of understanding of the world, a feeling for other men that staggers me." This complete edition brings together the three volumes of Olson's long poem (originally published in 1960, 1968, and 1975) in an authoritative version.
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( A seminal figure in post-World War II literature, Charl...)
A seminal figure in post-World War II literature, Charles Olson (1910-1970) has helped define the postmodern sensibility. His poetry is marked by an almost limitless range of interest and extraordinary depth of feeling. Olson's themes are among the largest conceivable: empowering love, political responsibility, historical discovery and cultural reckoning, the wisdom of dreams and the transformation of consciousnessall carried in a voice both intimate and grand, American and timeless, impassioned and coolly demanding. Until recently, Olson's reputation as a major figure in American literature has rested primarily on his theoretical writings and his epic work, the Maximus Poems. With The Collected Poems an even more impressive Olson emerges. This volume brings together all of Olson's work and extends the poetic accomplishment that influenced a generation. Charles Olson was praised by his contemporaries and emulated by his successors. He was declared by William Carlos Williams to be "a major poet with a sweep of understanding of the world, a feeling for other men that staggers me." His indispensable essays, "Projective Verse" and "Human Universe," and his study of Melville, Call Me Ishmael, remain as fresh today as when they were written.
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Charles Olson, born in Worcester, Massachusetts, December 27, 1910.
He was Phi Beta Kappa and a candidate for a Rhodes scholarship at Wesleyan University, where he earned a B. A. in 1932 and an M. A. in 1933 with a thesis on Herman Melville. By 1939 Olson completed course work for a Ph. D. in American civilization at Harvard University, published his essay "Lear and Moby Dick, " and received his first Guggenheim fellowship to continue research on Melville.
In the 1940 Olson moved away from a traditional academic career, through a disillusioning flirtation with politics, to his lifelong work as a poet. His youthful energy and scholarship came to distinguish his poetry. Much of the political 1940 were spent in Washington, D. C. , but in 1951 Olson joined Black Mountain College in North Carolina as a visiting professor, later becoming rector until financial difficulties forced the close of the college. At Black Mountain Olson found students and staff devoted to the active practice of the arts. In 1957 Olson moved to Gloucester, Massachusetts, where he had spent summers as a boy. He accepted positions as visiting professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo (1963 - 1965) and at the University of Connecticut (1969). He died from cancer in 1970. Olson wrote over 100 shorter poems now collected in Archaeologist of Morning. His most sustained effort to practice his poetic theories, however, was the Maximus Poems, a 20-year sequence published in three volumes. The poems are set in Gloucester, Massachusetts, and have as their hero the dynamic Maximus, who slowly becomes indistinguishable from Olson himself. The first volume of 39 poems was begun in 1950 and published as The Maximus Poems in 1960.
( Charles Olsons insistence that the public value of any...)
( Praised by his contemporaries and emulated by his succe...)
( "I have assumed a great deal in the selection of the po...)
( First published in 1947, this acknowledged classic of A...)
(Letters written during the spring and summer of 1951 conv...)
( A seminal figure in post-World War II literature, Charl...)
(CALL ME ISHMAEL, A STUDY OF MELVILLE, CHARLES OLSON, 1947...)
(Literary Nonfiction. Poetics. Edited with an introduction...)
The Scholar Poet Olson's wide reading informed his writings. Prose works, such as Call Me Ishmael (1947) and The Special View of History (1957), reveal his fascination with 20th-century man's discoveries concerning the dynamic, interactive nature of the world and man's possibilities in such a world. Influenced by Alfred North Whitehead concerning the interaction of the past and the present, Olson believed that each man could select from history what he needed to constitute a rich and useful present. Olson was further influenced by Carl Jung's integration of the world within the mind and the world without: man's lifelong task, Jung argued, was to find in external reality objects and events which can express in symbolic terms the secrets of creation locked in the unconscious. In Olson's poem "The Librarian" (1957) traditional distinctions between the mind and external reality evaporate. In his influential 1950 essay "Projective Verse" Olson defined poetry in terms of the dynamic world his contemporaries were discovering: "A poem is energy transferred from where the poet got it . .. by way of the poem itself . .. to the reader. " The poet's own energy as he writes is among that which is embodied in the poem. The syllable, Olson argued, reveals the poet's act of exploring the possibilities of sound in order to create an oral beauty. The line reveals the poet's breathing, where it begins and ends as he works. Conventional syntax, meter, and rhyme must be abandoned, Olson argued, if their structural requirements slow the swift currents of the poet's thought. The predictable left-hand margin falsifies the spontaneous nature of experience. In rethinking the possibilities of language, Olson acknowledged his debt to Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams. Olson also valued the breadth of Pound's historical knowledge, which made available so much of the past necessary to constitute a valuable present. In Williams' attention to the precise nature of individual objects and their relations, however, Olson found an alternative to the prejudices which marred Pound's reading of history. The poem "The Kingfishers" (1949), with its ornithological details and restless search of history, signals Olson's intention to synthesize the best of Pound and Williams. The history of man's migration west from primeval times reveals an energy to colonize which is precisely what Olson would transfer to his reader. In the tradition of Whitehead, Maximus enacts this history in order to make it a vital contemporary force. He walks through Gloucester, for example, retracing the steps of the colonists who carried western migration across the Atlantic. As the poems accumulate, Maximus pushes farther back into history and myth in order to understand ever more about the dynamics of migration. His efforts earn him a vision of the primal source of the energy which drove man west. For Maximus, this vision, found in "Maximus-from Dogtown IV, " expresses in a satisfactory way the secrets of creation which are locked in the unconscious. In Maximus Poems: Volume Three (1975) Maximus explores what he can accomplish now that he is empowered by his knowledge and vision.
Quotations:
"Whatever you have to say, leave The roots on, let them Dangle And the dirt Just to make clear Where they come from. "
"This morning of the small snow I count the blessings, the leak in the faucet which makes of the sink time, the drop of the water on water. "
"A poem is energy transferred from where the poet got it (he will have some several causations), by way of the poem itself to, all the way over to, the reader. "
"The poem, for me, is simply the first sound realized in the modality of being. "
"You can read everybody. It's not even interesting to tell the truth because to some extent it's false. "
"I take space to be the central fact to man born in America. I spell it large because it comes large here. Large and without mercy. "
"I don't live for poetry. I live far more than anybody else does. "
He was an energetic giant of a man. In his youth his energy took the form of conspicuous academic success. Its poems are, in part, an outgrowth of Olson's earlier political interests and his communal experiences at Black Mountain. Maximus labors to found in Gloucester a community devoted to creative pursuits. Its members will be the readers of the poems, to whom Maximus hopes to transfer the same creative energy which motivates him. Finding his efforts sabotaged by capitalism's exploitation of natural and human resources, however, Maximus becomes increasingly enraged and despondent. Nonetheless, he continues to write, developing his own creative powers in order to enhance his creative possibilities in a hostile world. Maximus Poems IV-V-VI rewards his labor. Because his poems were collected and arranged chronologically by others after Olson's death, the shape he would have given the volume, had he lived, is unknown. In individual poems, however, Olson as Maximus seeks new reconciliations-with his long-dead father, for example-and returns to the unfinished business of the first Maximus poems in an effort to restore Gloucester as a city full of creative possibilities. Yet the death of his wife, the distance of friends, and declining health made him feel more estranged and uncertain than in the first volume. In this, the most personal volume of the Maximus Poems, the empowered Olson and the uncertain Olson contest with one another. As death overtakes him, however, Olson resists despair by recognizing that the life he has lived in his poems may pose a sufficient alternative to the destructive capitalist norm to stand after he falls.
Olson married twice and was the father of two children.