The Sign-Making of David Jones

Abstract

5 He is probably referring to Robert Creeley, the Figure of Outward to whom he dedicated The Maximus Poems and of whom he said, I have learned more from him than from any Uving man. . Letters for Origin: 1950-1955, ed. Albert Glover (Lon don: Cape GoUard, in association with Grossman Publishers, 1968), p. 87. 6 Olson defiandy rejects God (the action is tropic: turned away / turned) yet acknowledges His veracity and terrible perfection. In his response to hierarchy (we who throw down hierarchy) he dethrones the father. 7 Olson was not, it seems, his own best editor. In publishing In Cold Hell, In Thicket he reUed on Creeley. Creeley's editing of Olson s Selected Writings should also be noted because it presents the Olson he finds most useful. For him Mayan Letters and Apol lonius of Tyana are central texts, the latter the pivot of the book. His selection from The Maximus Poems, the final section of the book, includes only poems of high merit and, among them, those in which dream materials are conspicuous. 8 For Olson, much of the excitement is in reading Frances Rose-Troup's John White: The Patriarch of Dorchester and the Founder of Massachusetts, a book, Mrs. Rose-Troup notes, that had been seen before pubUcation by Samuel Eliot Morison and not sufficiendy acknowledged in his Builders of the Bay Colony. In the earUer installment Olson had reUed on Morison's graceful but less evidential, less authoritative book for information about the founding and the career of John Smith. 9 Significantly, also, Kunt Circle. See Maximus Poems IV, V, VI, p. 129. 10 Perhaps foUowing Olson, Garland ends The Gloucester Guide with a description of this statue and recognition of casualties at sea. For Olson, the memorial's inscription ( They that go down to the sea in ships ) may have recaUed Pound's opening line. 11 See also Pacific Lament, an early poem on death at sea, a poem of turning in which death becomes repose at the source. 121 wish to acknowledge my debt to the many scholars who have recently written about Olson, and especially to George F. Butterick for, among other things, his annota tions of these poems.