One of the important topics in Olson's work is the relationship of the idea of culture to the idea of community. As he worked on The Maximus Poems in the early 1950's, Olson came to believe that modern poets should follow the advice of William Carlos Williams in his essay, "Descent," and resist the inherited culture, history, and mythology of Western Europe in favor of the local immediacy of one's own person and place. Olson interpreted the dominant ideas of Western culture as leading to egoism and the will to power. Against them he insisted modern man should employ a communitarian "alternative humanism" which would result in the "will to cohere." (pp. 13-14)

[In "To Gerhardt,"] Olson draws upon the myth of the death of the European corn-god in order to insist on the necessity of sacrificing the cultural tradition ranging from Homer to Pound.

Olson writes as...