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 connection beyond that of historical accident.

Much of Olson's theorizing has a familiar ring to it. Like many other poets, he believed that there was something morally wrong with modern industrial society, and he blamed the usual devils: Cartesian dualism, Protestant individualism, capitalism, rationalism, abstract language, advertising. And like those other poets (Ransom, Tate, and Eliot no less than the more congenial Pound and Williams), he...