SOURCE: "Anti-Poetic Fisher of Men," in Times Literary Supplement, No. 3585, November 13, 1970, p. 1315.

In the following review, the critic offers a negative assessment of The Maximus Poems.

Whoever dislikes the poetry of Charles Olson should take note of the abundant testimony of his admirers. Not all of them can be dismissed as friends, pupils, and debtors. Young men who have never met him privately celebrate the magical effect of his public performances. Young women stammer out eulogies of his inspiring example. Yet the story lingers in one's mind of the professorial friend whom Olson saw cupping a hand to an ear while the poet was reading his work in a Harvard auditorium, and whom Olson asked to leave because his attentive presence made a proper delivery of the verses impossible.

Sympathetic attention is not what The Maximus Poems call for. The patient reader may suppress a fatigued sense of...