Given the diversity of Olson's interests and preoccupations as a poet, we are confronted with the question: do the life and work of this poet have a design? And if they do, what premise could possibly draw all the relevant details together and make them meaningful, expressive of a single, absorbing concern? Olson's enthusiasms encompass such oddments as Hopi language, Mayan statuary, non-Euclidean geometry, Melville's fiction, the austere thought structures in Whitehead's philosophy, the fragmentary remains of the Sumerian and Hittite civilizations, Norse, Greek, and Egyptian mythology, numerology and the Tarot, the history of human migration, naval and economic history, the etymology of common words, pre-Socratic philosophy, the historical origins of the New England colonies, the development of the fishing industry off the coast of Massachusetts, accounts of the conquest of Mexico, the collapse of the Aztec and Mayan civilizations. The list could be extended. Is there an underlying unity at all? Or do these scattered interests, which seem to enter willy-nilly into Olson's prose and poetry, merely reflect the eccentric learning of the autodidact? Or might they imply a frantic mimicry of the erudition he envied in Pound?

Perhaps a bit of both of these is the answer, but Olson used his knowledge as comfortably as he drew upon his most casual experience. He fashioned his writing out of arcane lore with confidence; the prose emerges from an awesome memory, an almost total recall of his reading. His most difficult poems bear unwieldy structures of detail…. (pp. 5-6)

If Olson were merely Pound's mimic or a poseur, all the factual minutiae of his poems and essays would be dead weight. Part of the excitement of his best art, however, is the personal possession he takes of his learning; he expresses himself through mosaic patterns of allusion and direct quotation. All the haphazard learning is actually used in the writing; it contributes directly to the forms of his expression. He uses factual data as means of extending the range of his language. The terms and details of other fields of learning complicate and enrich the assertions of his prose. The diversity of his attention is almost a greed for experience, out of frustration with the fact that most of our thoughts arise within the narrow confines of ordinary experience. But Olson's most arcane references are at heart simple parallels to his own ideas. Perhaps the fault of this kind of writing is its tendency toward overelaboration; he often ran the risk of simply adorning his common sense instead of truly illuminating it with analogy. But the intention of all this breadth of reference, while not excusing its worst excesses, at least explains what it is attempting to do: to show a mind that has ventured out beyond its own routines of thought and experience and sought to immerse itself in areas of experience, of the remote past and of other cultures, that Western civilization has deliberately or unwittingly ignored.

We get close to the possibility of a unifying premise when we begin to think of Olson as an American writer who gradually came to reject certain of the tendencies he believed peculiar to Western civilization. There is no easy way to generalize on the nature of his rejection of Western thinking; his sense of the issues involved was entirely too specific for him to fix them into one embracing principle. We are on safer ground to suggest that he rebelled against philosophical discourse that required an abstract language to discover the laws of experience. Such discourse violated a basic integrity of communication for Olson: it assigned meanings to words different from the experience they specifically denoted. In this radical separation of human sign from its object, Olson believed that Western civilization had cut itself off from direct perception and, consequently, from a compassionate understanding of the phenomena of nature. (pp. 6-7)

He felt that once Greek philosophy had broken the bond between sign and referent, language began to acquire a logic of its own, distinct from its capacity to express reality. Language was thus allowed to drift from its representational functions, so that new, purely hypothetical conditions could be invented by the manipulation of words. (pp. 7-8)

Olson was not the first writer to raise these issues about language. The European phenomenologists, led by Martin Heidegger, made a more rigorous criticism of language from the same perspective. Heidegger attacked language especially for its vitiation of what he called Being; Olson's generally equivalent term was Self.

But Olson was not a trained philosopher nor was he particularly aware of the ferment of phenomenological thought in Europe at the time he was writing. Instead, his critique of the drift of language toward a generalized subjectivity was specifically directed toward poetry and the habits of its composition. Literature was the victim of the stagnation of language. A new poetic would have to include a new sense of language as well as a program for new forms and techniques of composition.

Olson's philosophical concerns converge on the remaking of poetry from its language to its most subtle refinements of form. The root of the poem is the word, and the word must be reoriented to its denotative function. The subjectivization of words had robbed them of their clear attachment to the world. Our ability to take the world in through words depends entirely upon the capacity of the words to transmit lived experience. But since the Greeks, Olson argued, the mind had come to hoard the signs of objects and attribute to them private notions of their meaning. The mind, intent to structure experience by increasingly rigid systems, had made words support such structurings, when in fact the real value of words lay in their power to assault structuring through what they told of nature's more changeful processes.

By subjectivizing words, or by suppressing their full weight of denotation, the mind could absolutize nature in terms of its own logical priorities. Hence, the poem, rather than displaying the awesome power of nature, tended to narcissize experience; the poem was not a mirror held up to man in nature but a reflection of the mind ruling over the natural realm. The whole stance of language must be reversed in order to bring about a new poetic. (p. 8)

Olson's own poetry is the primary instance of this new poetic: his poems strike us with an unfamiliar and sometimes disturbing discordance of sound and verbal texture, the result of a determined effort to bring into them a mass of language and event absent from what we usually expect in lyrical discourse. His style, whether he is writing prose or poetry, is characterized by a density of specific terms and a sodden weight of data. But the illuminations he can sometimes provoke from these jagged aggregates of words have a startling effect upon the reader.

Olson came to his convictions during a period of cultural trauma. In the same year that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were devastated by atomic bombs, scenes of the Nazi death camps had been filmed, and the lurid images of mass graves and the piled remains of cremated Jews would enter obliquely into Olson's earliest poems. Although he did not address himself to these events directly in anything he wrote during this time, we must assume that irrational violence and hatred affected him deeply and contributed to his growing sense that Western thought had drifted into an illusory world where language no longer inspired moral conduct….

[In Call Me Ishamel], he articulated his own belief that since the middle of the last century scientists and philosophers had begun to redefine the behavior of nature in ways that revealed an entirely new sense of reality, characterized chiefly by its kinetic state and its atomic particularity. Laid against this new sense of the actual was the older Western conception of a fixed, hierarchical model of reality, which Western language continued to impose on cognition through its grammar and syntactical laws. (p. 9)

He was a stern critic of the organizing powers of civilization, and he dealt with these as though they covered over the individual's access to his own primordial energies. He appreciated the psychological theories of Carl Jung, with their assertions of ancient archetypal experience. But Olson was not a new American version of Jean Jacques Rousseau, interested merely in the primitif for its own sake. Rather, he had a high regard for certain of the acquisitions of civilized man: language and the technologies of agriculture and building, the means by which human beings have come to insure their survival amid the adversities of the natural environment. He drew a sharp line between these improvements of the human condition and the distinctions civilization had created among its members, limitations of caste and privilege imposed on personal freedom and experience. He admired, then, the first stages of civilization having to do with survival itself, when the integrity of the community was still intact. But Plato's expulsion of the poet from his utopian republic was the culminating gesture of the move toward factionalism among early civilizations, and Olson treated capitalism as another manifestation of the same dispersive will, the drive in present civilization to seize and control existence. (pp. 10-11)

[He] believed that the government itself and the corporate economic system were responsible for undermining the formation of group identity in America, that they dissolved communal life in a deliberate leveling of the population into competitive individuals.

He wrote defiantly against this tendency in Call Me Ishmael and devoted much of his life to a long poem about a township on the coast of Massachusetts, Gloucester, where the dream of a communal life for its citizens began and died. (p. 16)

[The] essential Olson lies somewhere in a momentous rejection of a culture, a civilization, the values and philosophy of which have gradually diminished the unruly vitality of human awareness. In place of the communal relationships humans originally enjoyed have come disciplined populations of resentful, competitive individuals, each remote from his own real desires and indifferent to the natural world he lives in. Everything Olson wrote—the essays, the poems, the rambling harangues—speak to this one concern: how to restore to human beings their own primal energies. (pp. 21-2)

No other poet of his time had put to such serious use the gains made in the imagist tradition as did Olson; he gathered up what he felt had been the best innovations of the recent past in order to continue to revolutionize American poetry. (p. 22)