Charles Olson was not a man to be content with fascinating images. Arrogant, confusing, paralyzed at times by perpetual struggle with the language of the tribe, Olson nonetheless is the prototype for those contemporaries who insist that "arguing a world which has value" forces one beyond imagination to direct perception, to the cutting edge where man and the world are in perpetual interchange…. Only by absolute attention to this experience can we "restate man" in such a way as "to repossess him of his dynamic," to face the failures of humanism and rationalism and to create a postmodern definition of reality answering Rimbaud's, "what is on the other side of despair."… (p. 93)

Any cosmology that looks to only a specific part of itself, like man, as its measure and ultimate purpose borders always on despair; there are always potential contradictions between the multiplicity of the whole and the...