Charles Olson was an important force behind the raucous, explicit,
jaunty style of much of twentieth-century poetry in America. This
study makes a major contribution to our understanding of his life
and work. Paul Christensen draws upon a wide variety of source
materials-from letters, unpublished essays, and fragments and
sketches from the Olson Archives to the full range of Olson's
published prose and poetry. Under Christensen's critical
examination, Olson emerges as a stunning theorist and poet, whose
erratic and often unfinished writings obscured his provocative
intellect and the coherence of his perspective on the arts. Soon
after World War II, Olson emerged as one of America's leading poets
with his revolutionary document on poetics, "Projective Verse," and
his now-classic poem, "The Kingfishers," both of which declared a
new set of techniques for verse composition. Throughout the 1950s
Olson wrote many polemical essays on literature, history,
aesthetics, and philosophy that outlined a new stance to experience
he called objectism. A firm advocate of spontaneous self-expression
in the arts, Olson regarded the poet's return to an intense
declaration of individuality as a force to combat the decade's
insistence on conformity. Throughout his life Olson fought against
the depersonalization of the artist in the modern age; his
resources, raw verve and unedited tumultuous lyricism, were weapons
he used against generalized life and identity. This volume begins
with an overview of Olson's life from his early years as a student
at Harvard through his short-lived political career, his rectorship
at Black Mountain College, and his retirement to Gloucester to
finish writing the Maximus poems. Christensen provides a systematic
review of Olson's prose works, including a close examination of his
brilliant monograph on Melville, Call Me Ishmael. Considerable
attention is devoted to Olson's theory of projectivism, the themes
and techniques of his short poems, and the strategies and content
of his major work, the Maximus series. In addition, there is a
critical survey of the works of Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan,
Denise Levertov, Paul Blackburn, and other poets who show Olson's
influence in their own innovative, self-exploratory poetry.
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