Aristotle's Poetics and Elder Olson

Abstract

T HE CRITICAL writings of Elder Olson merit study because they offer a strong dissenting voice in a period when literary criticism is dominated by what may be broadly called depth psychology, anthropology, and semantics. Perhaps the most valuable emphasis in Olson's writings is his insistence that all systems of criticism and all attempts at practical criticism are governed by philosophical presuppositions, either implicit or explicit, which define the nature of literature and place it in the context of a more comprehensive system. There can be no adequate evaluation of a poetic theory, he insists, until the philosophic bases governing the theory have been discovered, evaluated in their own right, and compared with the theory which was derived, either consciously or unconsciously, from them. But, for all his insistence on this kind of rigor in literary criticism, Olson's own system has not fared well at the hands of the few critics who have criticized it in print. These critics tend to take issue either with the final interpretations which result from his system, or with the kind of system it is, rather than with philosophic presuppositions. To say that Olson has failed to grasp the contextual nature of poetry, as Krieger does-or that he has not seen that analogy and metaphor are the basis of poetry and must form the basis of any valid critical statement and that he is a less rigorous holist than the new critics, as Wimsatt does, or that he is a pure Aristotelian, as Ransom does-is to begin with the conclusions. These conclusions may or may not result from a proper study of Olson's poetics, but they cannot be justified until the philosophic bases have been determined. The foundation of Olson's poetic theory is quite freely acknowledged as the philosophy of Aristotle, and specifically Aristotle's method, which Olson calls