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Charles Olson's 'Maximus': Gloucester as Dream and Reality

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SOURCE: "Charles Olson's 'Maximus': Gloucester as Dream and Reality," in The Texas Quarterly, VOL. 20, No. 3, Autumn, 1977, pp. 20-9.

[In the following essay, Christensen discusses the major themes of The Maximus Poems.]

Charles Olson's distinguished long poem, the Maximus sequence, achieved final form with the publication of its closing book, The Maximus Poems: Volume Three in the early fall of 1975. Olson worked on the sequence for the last twenty years of his life; it is an intimate record not only of his passionate ideals but of the leaps and changes of his mind throughout that period. Like all works of high moral ambition, its appearance in final form has provoked mixed, even highly skeptical, reviews from critics who have had to judge its grand assertions. The New York Times described it as "a huge, angelic, failed effort"; Charles Altieri, writing a review for the Washington Post, called it "an ambitious failure." All the long poems written in this century—from Pound's The Cantos and Hart Crane's The Bridge (his hymn to the mysterious technology that created Brooklyn Bridge) to William Carlos Williams's Pater son and now Olson's Maximus—have been received similarly upon first public appearance, as though it were ritually necessary to attack poets who dare to inquire into the heart of a culture's mysteries and gods. In that ritual act of critics, the mythos of an age is fitfully revealed, as it more grandly is in the poems they judge. But what these poems illuminate of actual human nature and experience lies outside the purview of these preliminary assessments. I believe the more discerning criticism is that which asks of a poem like Olson's, What binds and unifies his work, what did he make, even if he fell short of his highest intentions?

Charles Olson's sequence, the Maximus poems, celebrates human community, as an ideal condition presently beyond the reach of mass man and as it may be achieved by the restoration of individual consciousness. Maximus himself, the speaker of this poem, is the primary example of how man struggles to transcend the alienation he suffers. In the slow unfolding of the poem we are intimate observers of the process by which this particular mind learns to break down its torpid subjectivity to become an active partcipant of reality again. And the implicit argument of the poem is that if each man were to achieve a similar openness, human community would again be a determinable possibility.

Olson came late to poetry; his first published poems appeared in 1946 when he was thirty-five years of age. Before turning to poetry he had successfully launched himself into politics. When he left Harvard University with all but his dissertation to write, he began working for the American Civil Liberties Union, and from there he went to the Common Council for American Unity. With the outbreak of World War II, he entered the Office of War Information, specifically to protect citizens of foreign nationality from slander or other abuse as the nation's mood grew militant. Olson was an ardent idealist of those years, among the bright young men Roosevelt had attracted to government service. When he left the OWI over a dispute with his superiors, Roosevelt promised him a high post in the Treasury after his reelection, but Olson refused and quit politics to become a poet.

Even in those early political years, it is possible to see the ruling ideal of Olson's life: the desire to preserve a union of diverse nationalities, races, and creeds against the oppressive force of a single domineering majority. The son of a letter carrier of Swedish ancestry, he watched how his father was systematically persecuted by his employers as he struggled to establish a postal union. The bitterness and despair of those years enter into the Maximus sequence as one of its moving themes.

When Olson turned from politics to poetry, he renounced his liberalism and his belief in the power of government to improve or protect life in the nation. He believed that only art could change man's mind: not by its precepts and revelations, but by the example of the artist's awareness. The poet, when he is fully awake to the world and to his own responsiveness, demonstrates the force and excitement of his mind in the poem he writes. The reader who takes up such work will have before him the measure of human intensity. The poet will have shown him the paradise life is when the mind is held open to take in the world, and the reader will, either in envy or in admiration, allow his own faculties to relax and let more of earthliness register on him.

In a number of essays written during the 1950s—"Human Universe," "The Gate at the Center," the famous "Projective Verse" essay, collected in Human Universe and Other Essays—Olson attacked the state of contemporary American writing. His essential argument was that modern writers presented an abstract conception of reality in their work. They make their stories and poems, he said, "by selecting from the full content [of reality] some face of it, or plane, some part." The result: "It comes out a demonstration, a separating out, an act of classification, and so, a stopping, and for all that I know [the reality] is not there, it has turned false." For the artist, Olson wrote several years later, "There is one requirement, only one requirement, anywhere—the clue: open, stay OPEN, hear it, anything, really HEAR it. and you are IN." [sic] Taking his cue from a writer he deeply admired, D. H. Lawrence, Olson wrote in a review, "Nothing is so marvelous as to be done alone in the phenomenal world which is raging and yet apart," as was Lawrence's protagonist in The Man Who Died. Writers, in other words, who abstract from reality some fragment of details unwittingly reinforce the state of alienation that art should oppose and transcend. The only alternative to this shrinking reality of the arts and of thought in general was to step out of the bounds of Western humanism to engage the world freshly again.

The primary task of the Maximus sequence is to thrust a mind into the disarrayed particulars of Gloucester, Massachusetts, a seacoast town, to show that it could indeed absorb all the impingements of reality and render up fresh, often beautiful perceptions of its true nature. Gloucester had been Olson's summer residence as a child when his parents annually rented a small cottage in a modest section of this coastal resort. Not only was it among the largest fishing ports in the world, it was among the oldest settlements of the New England coast. As early as 1623, Dorchestermen were subsidized in a venture to establish a fishery in Gloucester; although it failed economically, this experiment led to the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630. English Puritans under John Winthrop succeeded in establishing a settlement, but Winthrop's dream of making a "City upon a hill," or what Olson calls a "polis, " failed when the settlers stepped from the Arabella and scattered to the distant countryside. Community, then, was a dream that perished on contact with American soil, and Olson's Maximus returns to it again and again as he surveys the limits and conditions of the town he inhabits.

The Maximus sequence, which is composed of three volumes and runs to nearly six hundred pages of text, has, among its many skeins of development, an epistemological plot: the poem moves forward by the leaps of Maximus's perceptions. Maximus begins his thought in the alien condition of the average citizen; he drifts over the rooftops of Gloucester like a bird, observing the configuration the city makes in his mind: it is a totality his sensibilities have not yet absorbed. The city is a congeries, a sum of things, which he enters bearing the blade of his discriminating intelligence. That blade shall be added to the form of Gloucester, as a bird adds his straw or twig to the nest he builds. "The nest, I say, to you, I Maximus, say/under the hand, as I see it, over the waters from this place where I am, where I hear,/ can still hear." The form of Gloucester shall emerge in the poem that results as all the minutiae of the external world rush in and cohere in the perceptions of Maximus's mind.

Most of the ideas Olson uttered in his tensely written pronouncements on the state of poetry in the 1950s were intended to lead the poet away from the rigid conventions of traditional poetry toward an open stance he called Projectivism. This poetic charges the poet to explore his consciousness on paper in a language faithful to the events of his mind. The atrophy of awareness in modern technological society could be partly attributed to the distortions that traditional usage and convention have imposed upon consciousness. If the poet were free to simply cast his mind into language without falling into generality or abstraction (the universalizing tendencies of Western discourse that Olson fought against), it might be possible to make a true account of the nature of experience and of the human perception of it as it enters into the labyrinth of cognition. Hence, in the Maximus poems, we have before us the mind's processes reenacted typographically and linguistically. We are placed in the mind of Maximus among his most intimate dreams and thoughts as he bears us along in his deepening awareness of Gloucester.

But if the poetry is open in technique, the first volume, The Maximus Poems (1960), follows an orderly investigative procedure. Even this is part of the psychological realism of the poem: Maximus is careful and cautious in his first stages of contact with Gloucester. The first ten poems are really a reconnoitering by Maximus, an effort to attain some exact knowledge of the condition of Gloucester, the state of its fragmentation. The individuals that comprise Gloucester are buried over, he remarks, by the culture of the nation, with its vulgar advertisements and the deafening racket ofcorporate prosperity. The singing that Whitman once heard in America has turned into a deafening screech of product hawking, and the poet fears his citizens have lost the keenest sense of all, to hear, to hear clearly. The word hear is reiterated throughout these early poems almost incantatorily, in his plea for a restoration of that faculty. Maximus begins his penetration of the mysterious unities of the town in full self-consciousness, and he struggles unsuccessfully to take down those barriers that exclude him from fully sharing life with his fellowman; he aspires to be not poet, but poet-citizen, in order to transform Gloucester into his communal ideal, the polis.

In Letters 11-22 (the poems are called letters throughout the sequence), Maximus examines the social and economic history of Gloucester, where the early semblance of communal life was undermined by the first signs of capitalism and the consequent regimentaion of working life. Maximus sifts through the documents which reveal the turmoil of the early settlement as it is torn between two fates: to become the polis, that condition in which men live freely and share common beliefs, and a pejorocracy, a term Pound first coined in The Cantos, which translates to government by the worst. In Olson's poem, the pejorocracy was composed of all those who sought control of the community but who had no special wisdom or virtue, only the willfulness of their greed to drive them, and who finally accede to power. Olson was deeply opposed to capitalism as an economic principle; throughout his life he regarded capitalism as a consequence of the shift from a communal ethos to the ruthless philosophy of individualism. Like Pound and Williams before him, Olson rejected capitalism on the basis that it had merely fostered a hierarchy of ownership and servitude that continued the feudalism of the Middle Ages. Thus, in the poem's history of Gloucester, which is also the nation's history, the individual who once fulfilled himself through self-employment gradually became the means of another man's fulfillment, and his pleasure in the world shriveled to mere survival.

The heroic ideal of men happily self-employed is evanescent in early American history, and although he does not take up the theme in the Maximus sequence, Olson seems to have discovered its more durable equivalent in the civilizations of the ancient Sumerians and the more recent Mayans of the Yucatan Peninsula. Both grew up and prospered by virtue of their rational technologies and their keen preservation of individual autonomy within their communal systems. Olson comments at length upon each of them in "The Gate and the Center" and "Human Universe," but more importantly, it is in his poem "The Kingfishers," an elegy of sorts, that he rejects the whole of Greco-Roman inheritance that led to the sacking of Mayan culture by the Spanish and vows his heartfelt allegiance to the wholeness of life he finds among the ruins and artifacts of Mayan experience. Olson wrote of the early Gloucester as though it had made fitful promise to become the likeness of a new Sumer or a second Mayan Empire, only to be dashed by the same forces that overtook its predecessors.

The Maximus sequence celebrates a heroic past as much as it does the vision of a redeemed future, and in this sense it is very similar to the mythopoeic poems of Pound and Williams. Olson's heroic fishermen, brave, thrifty, expert about the sea, are overthrown by men who know nothing about their craft but only of accounts and the profitable distribution of fish produce. Pound's Cantos also look back to a heroic past, the enlightened leadership of the Italian Renaissance and, even earlier, to Confucian China. Williams similarly celebrates what Olson once derisively characterized as "blueberry America," the simpler past of American small towns which the industrial city of Paterson had been at one time. Olson closes the first volume of Maximus with a moving description of how Gloucester fishermen were transformed from heroic seafarers to corporate drudges. His examination of a lost heroic ideal is very much a part of the form of the American long poem of this century.

The second volume, Maximus IV, V, VI (1968), is more boldly executed. The orderly progression of the first volume is abandoned as we enter into the "field" of consciousness that is now Maximus's mind. In 1956, Olson began reading Process and Reality, a forbidding essay on cosmology that perceives among the swarming particulars of the atomic universe some dialectical process of formation by which things come into existence. To perceive these myriad unfinished processes of particulars in the kinetic field is to view reality, according to Alfred North Whitehead, the British philosopher who wrote the essay. It was this cosmological perspective that Olson radically simplified and brought into his poem to represent the particulars of Gloucester that swarmed over the surface of Maximus's mind. Gloucester was now to be viewed by Maximus as a fragment of atoms in the whole potential field of matter. Its time was merely part of some vast eternity of processes. Hence, from the first poems of the second volume we are made to regard Gloucester and the nearby Dogtown as clustered particulars in a swirling cosmos. The eternal objects of Whitehead's cosmology, those forces that enter and disperse forms throughout time, are discovered in the casual events of Dogtown's past. An unfortunate prank by a drunken sailor becomes the vortex of various Greek and Egyptian myths relating to the creation of the world. And this same sailor who perished on the horns of a bull is absorbed again into the mothering earth by the same principles by which everything else forms and dissolves.

But a subtle development of themes emerges among the three books of this volume. Book IV is concerned with various creation myths and their contemporary Dogtown analogues. Book V charts in detail the stages of human migration that led to the settlement of the New England coast. The death and unification of the sailor with earth in an early poem of Book IV foreshadows the subject of Book IV, with its visions of a unified and harmonious cosmos at the center of which stands Gloucester. It is likened to a jewel in the hair of the earth goddess: "The earth with a city in her hair/entangled of trees."

The second volume of the Maximus poems creates a mythic context in which Gloucester and Dogtown achieve their ultimate significance. It is in mythology, Olson insisted time and again, that the true primordial origins of man's consciousness are recorded—and the mythic imagination contains for him the most durable visions of a cosmic unity. The intense concentration upon migratory patterns makes history itself a process leading, for Maximus, to the founding of a new center of civilization. Civilization sprang up in the fertile ranges of Mesopotamia, and Sumer became the first center around which humanity densely gathered and began to express itself. The pattern of human migration was away from this primal center and westwardly—as it would be with the earth turning east—and humanity was scattered like a pod of seeds. Wherever these early explorers ventured, they forever tended toward America, toward the coast of Gloucester, and in Maximus's thought there is the constant implication that once the earth is fully girdled, man spread over the whole of the globe, and the traveling over with (the traveling that gave rise to the false sense man had of himself as alone, an individual responsible only to himself), Gloucester and the abandoned Dogtown shall be the epicenter of the new world community, its navel, the bud of the world rose. A new Sumer will arise if Maximus can inspire his fellow citizens to fight against the dissolution of Gloucester, prevent it from being devoured by Boston and the all-leveling culture of the nation.

In the third and final volume, The Maximus Poems: Volume Three, the poet falls back from the heady mythology of the previous three books to move among familiar objects again, the simple, elegant concreteness that composes Gloucester from day to day, season to season. The poet has earned an entirely believable omniscience about the town, a knowledge that includes the subtlest hue of sunset to the archival data of leases, wills, old account books, the exact and complex history of the ownership of certain city lots, the architectural details of houses long demolished. This preoccupation with close detail is a true reflection of Olson's own life. In the apartment at 28 Fort Square, Gloucester, where he lived from 1957 to 1969, the window frames are scrawled over with the penciled times of sunrise and sunset and other observations made while overlooking the harbor and fisheries. The poet contains in his own head what is missing in the actual Gloucester of the present; he has committed the life of the city to his memory. As he wrote in volume two, "My memory is the history of time."

It seems to me that here is the unique property of the long poem as a form: as he accumulates the material of the poem, the poet is gaining more and more of a context in which to rest his thought, until it would seem that the mere utterance of a word is enough to start chains of association through the reader's mind, as he recalls the different instances in which this word has already been used in the poem. At a certain point, the poet can depend upon what he has already written to express the connections, the significance of much that he says later. It frees him, in other words, to elaborate his thought in sudden fragments of language; at times no more than a word or two can function as a total poem. It is toward the end of a long poem that the poetry becomes almost unbearably rich with connotation. The final poem of Volume Three, for example, terminates the whole six-hundred-page poem with a list of eight words: "my wife my car my color and myself." Indeed, it is the last which so crowds the screen of the reader's attention that it almost calls up the whole of the poem by its mere mention.

The mood of the final volume is difficult to name precisely. It is a departure from the tone and dimensions of volume two, but the greater problem is that Olson left few notes or directions as to how the work was to be finally organized. George Butterick and Charles Boer, former students and close friends of the poet, arranged the poems in an order they felt best represented the implicit development of individual poems. Their editing has been scrupulous, but as Donald Byrd remarked in a recent review of Volume Three, it is likely that the work under Olson's hands would have been different, perhaps more jagged and with more of the astonishing leaps of thought he had achieved in volume two. Nonetheless, a clear extension of the work is visible in Volume Three, and the whole poem manages to sustain its overall integrity. Maximus seems to have found real contentment in his life as he roams the streets of Gloucester, day or night, recording the dawn light on the offshore rocks or the odor of an old garden while resting from a walk. He is the village sage, in a way, and he takes satisfaction in having mastered the knowledge of a culture and a local terrain. But we must also remember that this is Maximus after volume two, where the reach of thought is so extraordinarily broad. Few poets of the twentieth century have attempted so rigorous an expression of high ideals as Olson achieves in volume two. Not even Pound offers so densely clustered a set of ideas to convey his own vision in The Cantos. Even Yeats's system, really an astrological psychology, hasn't the reach of speculation that Olson forces into some ragged state of clarity. When we consider the mood of Volume Three it is almost inevitable there would be a sinking down to ordinary experience again, a falling off from the strain of his conceptions.

But throughout these poems there is the developing fear that not only is Gloucester doomed to become no more than a Boston suburb but that the nation will become some monstrous one-dimensional society premised on consumption and brute survival. Maximus frequently interrupts his musings on the manifest landscape of Gloucester to dread the tide of events he feels the city and the age itself are caught in. In one bitter lamentation he ends with this threat to the nation: If America cannot aspire to be an earthly paradise, "we will leave her/and ask Gloucester/to sail away/from this/Rising Shore/Forever Amen." It is the angry threat of a child, but a visionary child at the very least. Maximus is really becoming aware of his own solitude, the state or condition he intended to transcend in the first poems of this long sequence. Without naming his condition he moves toward the consciousness of his isolation. Even his mastery of Gloucester has cost him his dearest connections: "I've sacrificed everything including sex and woman/—or lost them—to this attempt to acquire complete/concentration." In a way, the last poem of the volume, with its eight words, seems the final, essential subtractions from the consciousness of Maximus, until, with the last, "myself," there is nothing left. "My wife" and "my car" refer to Olson's second wife who died in an auto accident, an experience so bitter for Olson that he was indelibly changed by it. "My color" may refer to Olson's painful last months, when he suffered cancer of the liver, from which he died in 1970. Maximus has thus moved from the earliest poems of Volume Three toward increasing loneliness, borne forward with the vision of an immense potentiality that his age squanders and destroys each day of his life. The great vision of volume two becomes the passing dream of the older Maximus of this final volume.

The communal ideal—this is the heart of the poem, what the poet finally captured in language, even though the poet failed to inspire a transformation of Gloucester itself. The poem is a failure if we can only perceive it as having an epic intent, in which the protagonist, for all of his vauntings, is unable to subdue his adversary. But there is no clear adversary, and if Maximus is a hero, he lays down his sword the moment he enters Gloucester. And his battle is with ghosts in a mist. He has come with a luminous ideal in his eyes, and after much travail and thought, that ideal passes, leaving the distinct, hard shape of the town as it is. If we can perceive the poem to have aspired to these facts, then we have a romance, not an epic, and Maximus may be seen as a great testament of the ethical imagination. It is a romance in the full sense of that term, just as Pound's The Cantos, Crane's The Bridge, Williams's Paterson, Robert Duncan's Passages, and Ed Dorn's Gunslinger are themselves romances. Epics, as W. P. Ker wrote at the end of the nineteenth century, an age of heroic tycoons, are for heroic times and heroic people. Romance is the natural antithesis of epic—it seeks a new ideal from which future heroes might emerge. John Stevens, in a recent study entitled Medieval Romance, complained that epic heroes do not have the word dilemma in their vocabulary and know nothing of spiritual or emotional difficulty; they only want to do battle against some enemy clearly marked on the horizon. Romance springs up in an age of confusion, when the coherence of faith is so eroded that the great ideals on which the civilization is predicated suddenly come into view again and compel attention. The great romances of the Middle Ages are the voluptuous portrayals of sexual love, raised to the austerity of a religion, sanctifying our most animal passions during the Hundred Years War.

The communal ideal is the stress of our own time, the sanctity of human relationships is our profound desire. It is an age, consequently, of political romances. Pound sought out the enlightened ruler who could unite us; Williams attempted to wring a village life out of the sprawl of Paterson; Olson wanted Gloucester to be the center of a new earth of relatedness, not only man and man, but man and the world around him, the world intimately related to its surrounding universe. The romance of polis comes in an age of deepening alienation, when all the known modes of relation are dissolving, including the ancient form of the family. It has become one of the most insistent themes of social theorists that the structure of society is beginning to simplify itself from within; it is sloughing off ethnic, racial, sexual, and age differences, as well as familial unities, and, as it does so, it is creating a more uniform population, a work force, that is increasingly more dependent on the economic system for its survival. Old forms of group protection are giving way, it seems, to individual rivalry for work and security, even within the family itself. As these profound changes erode traditional values, the fundamental ideals of Western civilization have loomed before poets again, to be examined anew, hoped for all over again, as we are swept into the disarray of the future.

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