Elder Olson has been a published and widely recognized poet from his nineteenth year. He continues, after more than fifty years, to publish poems regularly in the New Yorker, Virginia Quarterly Review, Chicago Review, Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, and elsewhere. The senior member of the Chicago Critics, Olson has, from the beginning, been one of its leading apologists and practitioners; his theories inform his poetry and control it.

Elder Olson and the other Chicagoans--who include R.S. Crane, W.R. Keast, Richard McKeon, Norman Maclean, Bernard Weinberg, and Wayne Booth--are pluralists; they believe that all validly argued philosophies are complementary, and that literary theory is a branch of philosophy, which is, either explicitly or implicitly, part of a whole system of thought. Yet the major thrust of Olson's theorizing has been Aristotelian, with its emphasis on plot (or on its analogues in works too short for full...