History as Animated Metaphor in the Maximus Poems

Abstract

C HARLES OLSON has been shoved aside in the recent critical rush to Lowell and Ginsberg. Yet, George Garrett, discussing contemporary radical poets, calls grand pooh-bah of the lodge, the big daddy,' and Hayden Carruth in his anthology of twentieth-century American verse says: Olson exerted, through his poems, criticism, and personal connections with younger poets, a more profound influence than anyone else on the course of poetry in America during the fifteen years past.2 Olson's reputation as a poet depends upon critical attitudes toward his major work, the Maximus Poems, a long open sequence left unfinished at his death in 197o. It works by cumulative effect, moving like Song of Myself, either backing up or going forward, but always and insistently in motion. Like the Cantos, Maximus attempts to destroy historical time.3 And like Paterson, Maximus grounds itself firmly in a place, Gloucester, Massachusetts, where spent most of his life. explores this town and its history, not for nostalgia, but for metaphor. The historical people, places, and events become ideas-in-motion, animated metaphors, or in Robert Creeley's words, tokens for a particular kind of activity and its apparent value.4 This historical material, usually connected with Gloucester's settlement and growth, is the chief figurative language of Maximus, individually and cumulatively adding depth and scope to the poem as each character, place, and incident suggests some aspect of the Maximus life or mu-sick society's opposition to it.