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 thought of poetry as a special, non-rational or non-discursive mode of thinking, which had the messianic task of rescuing us from the false ontologies to which the various devils had enslaved us. He believed, as did the others, that we suffer from a loss of immediacy and richness in our experience, a blindness to the particular thing in our obsession with essences and general laws. Such blindness has social consequences: those who do not register the immediate and particular are likely to do violence to nature or to other people in their pursuit of some abstract goal.

These ideas, by the time Olson took them up, were modernist clichés. But Olson also had a few ideas of his own, and these prove to be the most decisive for his poetry, and for the practical consequences of Black Mountain poetics. (pp. 220-21)

[Olson] was a didactic poet among imagists and connoisseurs of nuance…. (p. 221)

Olson's willingness to recite facts, or to make flat pronouncements unhedged by irony, does set him apart from most of his contemporaries and immediate predecessors…. Olson unfortunately gave himself to ideas that finally make nonsense of ideas, or reduce them to mere props in the melodrama of Commitment. His most attractive moments come in poems such as "In Cold Hell, In Thicket" or "Maximus, To Himself," in which he is writing explicitly about his own uncertainty and confusion; his considerable intelligence is most evident in those of his prose writings (such as the book reviews collected in Section IV of Human Universe) that bear on an immediate problem, rather than ultimate questions of ontology, morality, and poetics. When he tries to synthesize, he spews out contradictions at a rate that would have made even Ralph Waldo Emerson's jaw drop.

Intellectual confusion might do only minor damage to a poet of image and emotional nuance, but in a didactic poet it is a serious limitation. (pp. 221-22)

Of course, poetry of "process" has a history, though Olson tends to speak of it as if he had invented it himself. He does acknowledge the precedent of Keats's famous letter on "negative capability," but he treats this as an isolated, prophetic aperçu, rather than one expression of an attitude widely prevalent among Keats's contemporaries. (p. 223)

From Olson's doctrine of total immediacy, total immersion in changing appearances, comes an astonishingly literal-minded conception of language. In "Human Universe" … Olson makes a distinction "between language as the act of the instant and language as the act of thought about the instant." He wants to use "language as the act of the instant"—but the distinction itself becomes fuzzier and fuzzier the more one thinks about it. Language is inescapably temporal. Even a single word takes up more than an instant, and when one begins a sentence, one is already thinking ahead to the continuation…. Olson was a nominalist and a realist at once. He believed that the very grammatical categories of language reflect a false ontology, the imposition of taxonomies and essences on the flux of reality. Language as it lay ready to hand would not do. At the same time, he believed that if one were in a state of grace with the real, one could simply talk poetry. (pp. 225-26)

The wonder of it is that, despite his confusion, Olson wrote a few very moving poems. "In Cold Hell, in Thicket," "Maximus, to Himself," and "Maximus, from Dogtown I" are probably his very best, but there are others: "As the Dead Prey Upon Us," the Tarot-inspired "La Torre" and "The Moon Is the Number 18," "An Ode on Nativity," perhaps "The Kingfishers," though I think it has been overpraised, and "Letter I" and "The Twist" from Maximus, Vol. I. There is something appealing, as well as infuriating, about Olson's rough, urgent sincerity, especially when it is sincerity rather than an actor's rendering of sincerity. (p. 227)

Olson considered himself an impersonal poet; he wanted to get rid of "the lyrical interference of the ego" ("Projective Verse"). And yet, his most ambitious poetry forces us to look up his reading, his home town, his friends and acquaintances…. Wouldn't it have been more honest, and better for the poetry, to drop the pretense of impersonality and address the autobiographical aspect of [The Maximus Poems] sequence directly? By doing so, Olson could have made the private accessible to us by portraying it, instead of merely referring to it. But then again, his automatic conception of language might have prevented him from understanding that one must do more than name a thing to call up its presence for a reader.

Despite his talk of staying in the field of one's direct perception, of truth to experience, and so on, there is very little sense of life experienced firsthand in Olson's work. Here we may note a final paradox: Olson's extreme emphasis on flux as the true condition of reality rests, for its justification, not on the experience of the senses, but on data from the "supersensual world" that Henry Adams felt himself to be entering as he stared at the dynamo in 1900. Granted, we do experience change through our own senses, and in our own bodies, but we do not experience the world as "process" only. The table may be composed largely of empty space, with sub-atomic particles that are somehow also waves rushing about inside it, but we experience it as an inert, solid object with definite boundaries. Olson seems to have intellectualized this haeceitas out of existence. For all his emphasis on geography, he shows the reader a map, not the landscape itself. (p. 230)