Maximus Poems on the origins of America and its long cultural background reaching back
to Mesopotamia. He chose as his speaker the itinerant mystic and writer Maximus, who had
lived on the Phoenician coast in the fourth century A.D. and thus occupied a geographical
locus parallel to Olson’s on the Gloucester coast of North America. Like many long works
of the twentieth century, Olson’s engaged the present and informed it by means of ancient
cultural paradigms: myths, cultural morphologies, and the archetypal events underlying the
civilizations of the Western descent.
The project was slow in forming, but by 1953 much of the first volume of the work had
been written, and part of it, The Maximus Poems 1-10, was published. Another
installment, Maximus 11-22, followed in 1956, with the complete first volume
appearing in 1960 as The Maximus Poems. The second volume, Maximus IV, V, VI
was issued in 1968, but the final volume, The Maximus Poems: Volume Three, appeared
posthumously in 1975, reconstructed from among Olson’s working drafts by a former student,
George F. Butterick, and by Charles Boer, a colleague at the University of Connecticut.
Like its predecessors, Pound’s The Cantos and Williams’s Paterson, Olson’s
epic remained unfinished at the poet’s death, with various drafts pointing to an ongoing
text.
The overall structure of the poem is complete, however, and shows a poem growing out of
the work of its forebears and steadily evolving its own unique, if sometimes chaotic,
structure. The Maximus Poems narrates the beginnings of a fishery off Cape Ann that
became the Plymouth Bay colony and then Massachusetts. Olson dissects the historical
records to show how a small community of fishermen was taken over by British investors,
and thus America itself came under corporate control at its inception.
In the next volume, Maximus IV, V, VI, Olson employs "field
composition," the use of the page as a landscape on which to represent the play of
forces in nature. He called his method "reenactment," and the cascade of words,
numbers, and documents maps phases of Western migration, the origins of Gloucester, and
the growth and decay of American culture. The shape of history is organic. The upside-down
lotus representing the spread of the cosmos in Hindu mythology appears in the poem as a
motif of the organicity of all events.
The Maximus Poems, Volume Three, though edited by other hands, follows the logic
of the preceding books to close the epic. Maximus explores modern Gloucester through eyes
that have witnessed the rise and fall of civilizations elsewhere. The poems, or
"letters" as they are sometimes called in the text, are by turns elegiac and
contentious, but elegant in their grasp of myth in everyday life. The grand cosmic design
is partly revealed in the minutiae of the town, and Maximus, like T. S. Eliot’s
Tiresias, bears a memory that is the "history of time."
Olson left Black Mountain College in 1957 to write in Gloucester, and from 1963 to 1965
he taught modern literature at the State University of New York at Buffalo. In January
1964 Olson’s second wife was killed in a car crash, which stunned him and haunted his
poetry toward the end. Work on the Maximus cycle slowed in the final years of his
life, but his reputation as an innovator and thinker was secure despite the critical
controversies raging around him. American poetry would never be the same after him. In
1969 he was invited to teach at the University of Connecticut, but after several sessions
he was stricken with liver cancer and was forced to withdraw. He died in New York.
Bibliography
Olson’s papers are housed in two major depositories, the Olson Archive of the
University of Connecticut and the Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas,
Austin.
Other works by Olson are Causal Mythology (1969), The Fiery Hunt and Other
Plays (1977), and The Post Office: A Memoir of His Father (1974). Olson’s
reading list for poets is in A Bibliography on America for Ed Dorn (1964). Selected
Writings, ed. Robert Creeley (1966), and Additional Prose, ed. George F.
Butterick (1974), reprint short works. The Special View of History, ed. Ann
Charters (1970), and Muthologos: The Collected Lectures and Interviews, ed.
Butterick, contain his work on history. Charles Olson and Ezra Pound: An Encounter at
St. Elizabeths (1975) reprints his notes on Pound.
Biographies include Tom Clark, Charles Olson: The Allegory of a Poet’s Life
(1991) and Charles Boer, Charles Olson in Connecticut (1975), on the last days.
Studies include Ed Dorn, What I See in the Maximus Poems (1960), Sherman Paul, Olson’s
Push (1978), Robert von Hallberg, Charles Olson: The Scholar’s Art (1978), Paul
Christensen, Charles Olson: Call Him Ishmael (1979), and Don Byrd, Charles
Olson’s Maximus (1980).
Olson’s correspondence is in Letters for Origin, ed. Albert Glover (1969); Charles
Olson and Robert Creeley: The Complete Correspondence, ed. Butterick (1980- ); and In
Love, in Sorrow: The Complete Correspondence of Charles Olson and Edward Dahlberg, ed.
Christensen (1990).
Source: http://www.anb.org/articles/16/16-02171.html;
American National Biography Online Feb. 2000. Access Date: Wed Mar 21 15:44:56 2001
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