Charles Olson Reconsidered

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.