The Maximus Poems by Charles Olson

First published: 1960, 1968, 1975, 1983

Type of work: Poetry

The Work:

The Maximus Poems is Charles Olson’s most significant work. Sections of The Maximus Poems, begun in 1950, were published as Olson produced complete parts. The first volume of the book, called simply The Maximus Poems, was published in 1960. A second volume, titled Maximus Poems IV, V, VI, was published in 1968. The Maximus Poems, Volume Three was published in 1975. Charles Boer, Olson’s executor, had the job of emending the text at the University of Connecticut, producing the final volume, published in 1983 by the University of California, Berkeley.

Only a half dozen or so legitimate long poems were published in the United States during the twentieth century, and Olson’s is certainly one of the more important. Some of the reason for this has to do with the poet, and some has to do with his teaching at Black Mountain College in North Carolina and his other writing, in particular Mayan Letters (1953) and his famous essay “Projective Verse.” Both of these relate to the business of The Maximus Poems.

Olson was born near Gloucester, Massachusetts, the town he adopted as his through The Maximus Poems. He was an imposing figure, standing six feet, ten inches tall, with penetrating eyes and, during the last twenty years of his life, long white hair. He spent time in Washington, D.C., visiting Ezra Pound at St. Elizabeths Hospital; time in the Yucatán Peninsula; and time at Harvard University, where he wrote a work on Herman Melville titled Call Me Ishmael: A Study of Melville (1947). Many of his ideas and discoveries are found in the correspondence he conducted with American poet Robert Creeley. The letters in Mayan Letters were all written to Creeley. Later, Olson became provost of the experimental Black Mountain College, offering his own classes in poetics, in which The Maximus Poems and their theories weighed heavily.

Olson conceived of the idea of writing a long poem with a central, larger-than-life figure at its center, a person to be called Maximus. The Maximus of the poems may have been meant to resemble Olson himself, being larger than life and living in Gloucester. Many of the poems are interpretations of events that occurred in Gloucester, from simple daily events, such as the fishing boats going out, to a murder that was never solved. The geography of the town was also important to Olson, as were even the smallest details of the place. Many of the poems discuss “the cut,” which is a channel between the fishing boats and an inland waterway. A movable bridge was built where Olson’s cut used to be.

A fair proportion of the population of Gloucester in Olson’s time consisted of Portuguese immigrant fishermen and their families. They are referred to in the poems, as are surrounding villages. This area, close to Cape Cod, later became very popular with tourists, but it was not so when Olson lived in a tiny apartment overlooking the ocean, an apartment crammed with books and his typing materials. He used to walk the streets at night, in the manner of Edgar Allan Poe, absorbing sounds and smells that would become part of his epic book.

What was Olson about with this book, with which he expressed dissatisfaction near his death? There is no easy answer, but clues can be gleaned from his other writing. In “Projective Verse,” he writes of a kind of poetry that would live on the page, that would be kinetic, that would utilize the entire page and whatever other materials the poet felt called upon to utilize. The result in his own poetry, including hundreds of pages of The Maximus Poems, is a poetry that looks chaotic on the page but that follows his own prescripts in his essay. Many of the poems are spread out across the page in what Olson referred to as “the field of the page,” utilizing open parentheticals, sometimes a complete lack of punctuation, and often decisions of how to read the poem that can be answered only by a reader.

Olson was also a student of history, back to the Greeks. One defining element in The Maximus Poems is the notion that a human being can be a polis, or a city, that an individual may have the ability to contain knowledge, power, and influence. Olson tried to present his Maximus figure as just such a polis. At other times in the poems, Olson seems to acknowledge that a person—most people, anyway—will be incapable of such a feat; then, a literal city, such as Gloucester, becomes polis. The best place to see this in action is in the collection Maximus to Gloucester: The Letters and Poems of Charles Olson to the Editor of the “Gloucester Daily Times,” 1962-1969 (1992). During the period covered in this text, Olson lived in Gloucester only part of the time, but he kept up his subscription to the town’s newspaper. Olson was not deferential about sending his poems, often poems that became part of The Maximus Poems, to the newspaper’s editor as commentary on thing he read in the paper. His overall interest in the Gloucester newspaper reflects his interest in polis and his belief that the body politic is of utmost importance.

Another issue receiving attention in The Maximus Poems is Olson’s “discovery” in the Yucatán Peninsula. Olson thought that he had come upon the descendants of the people of the area who, very unlike Americans or Europeans, were capable of wearing their insides on their outsides. His poem “A Moebius Strip” uses a mathematical phenomenon to illustrate what he means. He saw these people as being utterly disingenuous, without pretense: You got what you saw, both inside and outside.

Parts of The Maximus Poems do not so much attempt to find or construct such a model as meditate upon it. Stylistically, a good portion of The Maximus Poems is rather dry and abstract. Other sections are very difficult to follow, and anyone trying to read and understand all of The Maximus Poems at once is taking on a daunting challenge. Olson did not feel a particular debt to his reader; he felt a debt to his muse. Some poems sound like essays, and others have allusive qualities that make them very difficult.

Anyone attempting to decipher The Maximus Poems would be aided by a good working knowledge of Greek mythology. The work contains a number of references to Aphrodite and Demeter, as sexual goddess and earth mother, respectively. It takes some interpreting to develop these ideas. Persephone is in the curl of a wave, and the imagery sounds sexual with proper study. Without some kind of guidance, however, a reader is likely to glean only ocean references.

References to Gloucester politics and history emerge in poems such as the famous “The Librarian,” in which Olson asks the open question at the end of the poem, “Who lies behind/ Lufkin’s Diner?” Presumably, all references in the work would be clear to someone who lived in Gloucester at the time these lines were written, but they pose challenges to anyone reading these poems after Olson’s death in 1970.

A reader may also get the impression of speed while reading The Maximus Poems, a sense that one cannot let up. That response may come from Olson’s dictum, stated in “Projective Verse,” that “one perception must immediately and directly lead to a further perception.” Such was his theory for poetry as a whole, with which many of his poet friends disagreed. In fact, the writing of The Maximus Poems probably at times was a lonely enterprise. Some of Olson’s peers appear to have viewed the project as overly ambitious. Olson wanted to write a poem that would include it all and do it all; that may have struck some as being overly ambitious, to put it mildly.

Reading The Maximus Poems, one learns about the Native Americans who inhabited the area in the seventeenth century, about the “settling” of the area, and why Gloucester became a fishing village, with very little other trade important to the village. All one need do is glance through George Butterick’s A Guide to “The Maximus Poems” of Charles Olson (1978) to see the depth and breadth of Olson’s knowledge and research.

Another way to view these poems is to see them as mythmaking in the raw, using at their central core the changed figure of Olson himself, Olson become Maximus. If most myth is, as theory has it, based on reality and history and on stories, then Olson brought into the twentieth century the materials of that construction, or what he calls “the materials of the weight,/ of pain,” perhaps a reference to what such an enterprise took from him in its twenty years of development.

The evidence is that although Olson was preparing to write a very long poem around 1950, he had already written several poems with the name Maximus within them. He seemed ready to start a long poem with a poem titled “Bigmans I,” obviously close in statement to “Maximus.” He had a corpus of work at hand, and he added “I, Maximus,” drawing even tighter his own personal hold on the concept of this long poem that he knew would be based in Gloucester, though Cape Ann figures prominently in the poems. A guiding principle to Olson was John Keats’s line, “A man’s life of any worth is a continuous allegory,” a statement that is in evidence throughout The Maximus Poems.

Clearly, Olson had been impressed by his visits with Ezra Pound, and while in the midst of The Maximus Poems, Olson visited Pound in seclusion in Italy. Olson had also used Pound’s Cantos as a text at Black Mountain College. His reverence for the long poem had been long established. Olson’s “Projective Verse” ends on a note calling for epic and long poems. Early in February of 1950, Olson rejected the long poems of T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, and even Pound, and began on The Maximus Poems, a poem that would attempt to fit it all in, a long poem for the twentieth century in all of its complexity and mythmaking.

Bibliography

Bollobas, Eniko. Charles Olson. New York: Twayne, 1992. Focuses on Olson’s poetic decisions, the most important of which is The Maximus Poems, in relation to the events of his life.

Butterick, George F. A Guide to “The Maximus Poems” of Charles Olson. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978. Indispensable resource for anyone seeking to understand the allusions and references in Olson’s long poem. Many of the annotations, which took ten years to write, include arcane material, but they give a view into Olson’s mind.

Fredman, Stephen. The Grounding of American Poetry: Charles Olson and the Emersonian Tradition. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Analyzes Olson’s focus on the intellect and on thought processes in his poetry, as opposed to the American tradition of emotional and responsive poetry. Discussion of The Maximus Poems describes it as an abstract, highly intellectual text.

Kim, Joon-Hwan. Out of the “Western Box”: Towards a Multicultural Poetics in the Poetry of Ezra Pound and Charles Olson. New York: Peter Lang, 2003. Describes how Olson’s poetry explores diverse cultures, anticipating the future rise of multicultural and deconstructive criticism.

Maud, Ralph. Charles Olson at the Harbor. Vancouver, B.C.: Talonbooks, 2008. Critical biography demonstrates how Olson’s essay “Projective Verse” created a significant and enduring change in poetic thought.

Olson, Charles. Maximus to Gloucester: The Letters and Poems of Charles Olson to the Editor of the “Gloucester Daily Times,” 1962-1969. Edited by Peter Anastas. Gloucester, Mass.: Ten Pound Island, 1992. Letters and poems show how the local was important to Olson, particularly the local as applied to Gloucester politics and day-to-day life.

Von Hallberg, Robert. Charles Olson: The Scholar’s Art. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978. Provides a good introduction to the complexity of Olson’s poetry. Points out Olson’s use of myth and other original contributions to The Maximus Poems and also notes the importance of thought to Olson’s poetics.