Olson's Maximus suite - rambling, blustery, meditative poems on the
American past and present - often speaks best to the reader in the
lyric sections. When Olson says, for instance, in "Maximus, to
Himself," that "it is the undone business/ I speak of," or that "I
had to learn the simplest things/ last," or "that we grow up many/
And the single/ is not easily/ known," he is encapsulating in
fragmentary observations much of the emotional drive of his master
plan. It is not only that the parts of Maximus are better than the
whole, but also that the whole, taken as such, is continually
eluding artistic definition, while the "incidental," even
fortuitous aspects of Olson's congeries really give us the heart of
the man. Olson, who died in 1970, had great underground reclame
during the '50s for his "open" structure or "high-energy
construct," a technique which both looked back to Pound and
Williams and ahead to the Beats. Yet his myth of the Republic "in
gloom at Watchhouse Point" is never as persuasive as Williams'
similar effort in Patterson. Randall Jarrell says of the industrial
swamp of Williams' northeastern New Jersey that "in these poems the
Nature of the edge of the American city - the weeds, clouds, and
children of vacant lots - and its reflection in the minds of its
inhabitants exist for good." Olson, lacking Williams' blessed,
pragmatic concreteness, was often given to blunt theorizing or
fulminations against "the Big False Humanism." He was not the
profound chronicler of the American adventure he took himself to
be; he was, rather, a miniaturist of the populist spirit which is
always veering toward some marine or pastoral solitude. Beneath his
cantankerous persona there was a gentle soul. (Kirkus Reviews)
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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