SOURCE: "Charles Olson's 'Maximus': Gloucester as Dream and Reality," in The Texas Quarterly, VOL. 20, No. 3, Autumn, 1977, pp. 20-9.

In the following essay, Christensen discusses the major themes of The Maximus Poems.

Charles Olson's distinguished long poem, the Maximus sequence, achieved final form with the publication of its closing book, The Maximus Poems: Volume Three in the early fall of 1975. Olson worked on the sequence for the last twenty years of his life; it is an intimate record not only of his passionate ideals but of the leaps and changes of his mind throughout that period. Like all works of high moral ambition, its appearance in final form has provoked mixed, even highly skeptical, reviews from critics who have had to judge its grand assertions. The New York Times described it as "a huge, angelic, failed effort"; Charles Altieri, writing a review for the Washington Post, called it "an...