In the following essay, von Hallberg discusses the defining influence of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams on Olson's poetry.

In the following essay, Butterick examines how Olson attempted to break with traditional western rationalism.

In the following excerpt, Merrill examines the principles underlying Olson's unorthodox use of language.

In the following essay, Kellogg examines Olson's shorter poems in light of the poet's own principles of direct experiential knowledge.

In the following excerpt, Thurley faults Olson for what he perceives as superficial and erroneous elements in his poetics.

In the following excerpt, Paul presents a critical overview of the first volume of Maximus Poems.

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

In the following essay, Creeley discusses Olson's concepts of history and identity.

Charles Olson wrote "The Kingfishers" in 1949 when his "stance toward reality" was quickening. Soon he would codify that stance and the principles of its expression in two position papers, "The Human Universe" and "Projective Verse," but in "The Kingfishers" we have perhaps the most dense rendering of the Olson posture. Later, in The Maximus Poems, the density will attenuate and the method will lose some of its aggressive presence, but in...

Once at a poetry reading at Brandeis Charles Olson "got so damned offended" that he screamed at his audience, "You people are so literate I don't want to read to you anymore." To underscore the seriousness of his point, he added, "It's very crucial today to be sure that you stay illiterate simply because literacy is wholly dangerous, so dangerous that I'm involved everytime I read poetry, in the fact that I'm reading to people who are literate&#...

Olson's essay ["Projective Verse"] begins with this diagram:       (projectile       (percussive     (prospective                     vs.        &#...

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 wa...

The term ["postmodern"] was first used, apparently, by the historian Toynbee, although Olson—and this is not generally known—may have actually been the first to use it in its current application, and the first to use it repeatedly if not consistently…. As Olson uses it, the designation serves not merely to advance beyond an outmoded modernism, but it seeks an alternative to the entire disposition of mind that has dominated man's intellectual and political life since...

Olson's push, to use his own emphatic and often self-characterizing word, is important. This may be gauged by the fact that anyone wishing to understand recent poetry and writing—post modernism, literature since World War II—has sooner or later to come to him. He is a central figure, a "vortex," rightly compared with Ezra Pound, one of his masters in a preceding generation. (p. xv) [Olson] was determined to recover beginnings, the origins of new possibilities. His push inv...

Given the diversity of Olson's interests and preoccupations as a poet, we are confronted with the question: do the life and work of this poet have a design? And if they do, what premise could possibly draw all the relevant details together and make them meaningful, expressive of a single, absorbing concern? Olson's enthusiasms encompass such oddments as Hopi language, Mayan statuary, non-Euclidean geometry, Melville's fiction, the austere thought structures in Whitehead's philoso...

Stated in its simplest form, Olson's Projective Verse theory has three main principles. The first is that a poem must be a high "energy discharge" from the poet to the reader. Second, the form of a poem is an extension of its content. And third, "ONE PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY LEAD TO A FURTHER PERCEPTION." Olson's essay "Projective Verse" originally appeared in 1950; by 1960 the Projective Verse theory was widely acclaimed as the dominan...

The Black Mountain theoretical program, which is mainly Olson's creation, I find profoundly confused, desperate, and pretentious. If it has given its adherents a sense of mission and the courage to go on with their work, it may have had some pragmatic value, but its self-indulgence and doubletalk have done visible damage to that work. As a serious contribution to esthetic theory, Olson's projectivism is bankrupt. But it is the theory, like it or not, that gives the Black Mountain poets a conne...

[In Call Me Ishmael Olson] makes clear his relation to a responsiveness and decision in such writing to be found only in such comparable works as D. H. Lawrence's Studies in Classic American Literature, W. C. Williams' In The American Grain, and Edward Dahlberg's Can These Bones Live. In this respect, criticism is not only a system of notation and categorization—it is an active and definitive engagement with what a text proposes. It is not merely a descriptive process. Call Me Is...

Call Me Ishmael (1947) is a book in name only. It is print rendered aural and haptic, a metaphor for manuscript and collage. That is why its sound and shape are so startling. As Charles Olson says of Billy Budd: "It all finally has to do with the throat, SPEECH." And therefore, with the breath…. Call Me Ishmael, a consummate instance of aurality and hapticity in modern literature, is a redramatization of language. For although it is (often brilliant) scholarship and criticism, it is als...

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

[There] is evidence in the eleven plays collected [in The Fiery Hunt and Other Plays]—play, dance, dance-and-verse, opera—that Olson knew the various theaters of the classic Greeks, of Noh, of the masque, and of such exemplary contemporary companies as the Yiddish Art Theatre…. Olson was impatient with "straight theatre," which he felt was too much concerned with "contemporary realism." he wanted "enlargements and poets' treatment," a dra...

Charles Olson … exists in the world of factions—of manifestoes and extravagant gestures. He appears to be influenced by such rebels against orthodoxy as Pound and the Rimbaud of Les Illuminations. So far so good, I suppose: Pound and Rimbaud were geniuses who succeeded, against all probability, in expanding the boundaries of poetry. In Olson, however, the habit of scholarly detail inherited from Pound clutters the imagination, and the habit of recklessness in imagination (inherited maybe from ...

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 cultur...