Charles Olson

<p>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.</p> <p>Paul Christensen draws upon a wide variety of source materials-from letters unpublished essays and fragments and sketches from the Olson Archives to the full range of Olson's published prose and poetry.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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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 <i>Maximus</i> poems. Christensen provides a systematic review of Olson's prose works including a close examination of his brilliant monograph on Melville <i>Call Me Ishmael</i>.</p> <p>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 <i>Maximus</i> 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.</p>