Whoever dislikes the poetry of Charles Olson should take note of the abundant testimony of his admirers. Not all of them can be dismissed as friends, pupils, and debtors. Young men who have never met him privately celebrate the magical effect of his public performances. Young women stammer out eulogies of his inspiring example. Yet the story lingers in one's mind of the professorial friend whom Olson saw cupping a hand to an ear while the poet was reading his work in a Harvard auditorium, and whom Olson asked to leave because his attentive presence made a proper delivery of the verses impossible.

Sympathetic attention is not what The Maximus Poems call for. The patient reader may suppress a fatigued sense of déjà vu as he glimpses Crane's The Bridge (or Waldo Frank's introduction to it) in some elements of Maximus, and Wil liams's Paterson in others. But his impression of the author as a devalued Pound must remain; for the doctrine and mannerisms of the Cantos pervade Olson's collection.

Suppose one forcibly ignores one's experience of the real thing and determines to treat the Maximus sequence as an independent design: what pleasures will reveal themselves? Readers who have no acquaintance with deep sea fishing and no knowledge of American colonial history may be entertained by the snatches of John Smith's prose or the anecdotes of disasters at sea. Connoisseurs of grammar may relish Olson's habit of omitting relative pronouns and the prepositions of time or place. Rhetoricians may study his addiction to aposiopesis. Puzzle-solvers will be happiest of all, tracing "mettle" on page 131 to Corinthian bronze on page 123, or connecting the "nasturtium" on page 93 with the "nose-twist" on page 36.

The unhappy few who listen for lines that engrave themselves on the tables of memory, for rhythmic subtlety or the undeniably right choice of words, for grace of sound or felicity of perception, for a fresh, true insight into the human condition—in other words, for significant art—will feel generally thwarted. Mr. Olson is too busy with his lofty programmes of metrics and sociology to sink to mere pleasurable art; he is too busy recommending craftsmanship to exemplify it. Finally, one comes to suspect that in his own person Olson exerted a magnetic force that he failed to infuse into his writing.

It is no accident that one of the most coherent poems in the collection is about the devices by which a false poet establishes a real reputation ("Letter 5"). Here the unfortunate Ferrini, editor of a little magazine called Four Winds, comes under a cannonade for using his publication to promote his own career:

what sticks out in this issue is verse
from at least four other editors
of literary magazines.

Hatred of those who have received unmerited recognition is a driving impulse behind Olson's work. The poet identifies himself with unappreciated artisans, forgotten colonists, unsung fishermen. The virtues he admires are modest heroism, craftsmanship for its own sake. Whether he embodies them remains a question.

Olson chose "Maximus" for his pseudonym partly because he was tall but more because he wished to suggest an imaginative energy that gives men their greatest spiritual stature, the energy everyone has access to but few men tap. On those few, says Olson, depends the health of the polis, or true community; and when the leaders of the people end their attachment to a craft or to a primary industry (such as fishing), when they abandon themselves to blind money-making, absentee ownership, advertising, then the true community crumbles. The poet, the fisherman, represent types of local vocations rooted in specific places, strengthening the polis. Even in nature the bird building its nest shows the same kind of radical, constructive art.

Maximus addresses himself to his own city (Gloucester, Mass., a fishing port), which he hopes to save from the corruption he says has ruined most of America. He wishes to open the doors of perception in his fellow townspeople:

that all start up
to the eye and soul
as though it had never
happened before

The argument is as familiar as it is pathetic and self-contradictory; for if the way of life the poet recommends ever did exist, and if it were as satisfying as he claims, no people would abandon it. Contrariwise, if artless men are to be converted to such a faith, Olson's kind of poem is hardly the best instrument for the task. If the poet does not falsify the fisherman's work, he does sentimentalize the fisherman.

The free forms of the poems seldom add depth to the doctrine; for, in accordance with his literary programme, Olson leaps in mid-line from the poet's surroundings while writing to the memories his impressions provoke, or from minute autobiography to extracts from historical documents, or from economic theory to invective against America. Most of his language is deliberately flat, slangy, anti-poetic. But the surface of toughness dissolves in the few lyric passages, which could not be softeror more conventional—especially those dealing with springtime. It is an easy step from the moralization of landscapes to the denunciation of their spoilers. Olson follows a well-worn path when he calls for the destruction of those he would also like to save, and he says (addressing a bulldozer):

clean the earth
of sentimental
drifty dirty
lazy man

Is the poet excluded from this category?