Content area
Full Text
Despite his well-known dismissal of the classical Greek tradition, Charles Olson alludes to Hesiod surprisingly often in his poetry and prose. This essay asks why Olson found Hesiod useful and suggests that earlier critics have misread the nature of Olson's relationship to Hesiod.
I was very lucky once to have what poets call visions.
-Charles Olson, Muthologos
A central poet in Don Allen's influential 1960 anthology The New American Poetry, Charles Olson (1910-70) is best known for his 1950 manifesto "Projective Verse" (Prose 239-49) and his three-volume epic, The Maximus Poems. His poetry can seem dauntingly obscure, at least at first reading, and his allusions rival Ezra Pound's in the demands they place on their reader. For example, near the end of the first volume of The Maximus Poems, which up to that point has focused almost entirely on Gloucester, Massachusetts, readers encounter the lines "step off the / Orontes onto land no Typhon" (155). In his indispensable Guide to The Maximus Poems of Charles Olson, George Butterick offers a helpful gloss: the Orontes is a river in Syria, site of the battle between Zeus and the monster Typhon (217-18). What must have seemed a mysterious yet minor tangent to readers of that first volume takes on greater significance in volume two, where Hesiod-who is our earliest source for the Zeus-Typhon battle-provides important source material for such major poems as "MAXIMUS, FROM DOGTOWN-I" and "MAXIMUS, FROM DOGTOWN-IV," as well as other poems in volumes two and three, including the poem from which this essay takes its title.
Olson's interest in Hesiod may seem surprising in light of his critique of classical Greek metaphysics in his essay "Human Universe," his insistence at the end of "The Kingfishers" that "I am no Greek," or his criticism of Ezra Pound in the Mayan Letters for "stay[ing] inside the Western Box" ( Writings 129). Olson's interest in ancient history is focused almost entirely outside the "Western Box," on such peoples as the Hittites or the Phoenicians, but not on the Greeks. Charles Boer tells us that Olson tried to per- suade him to drop his doctoral work on Euripides's The Bacchae and focus instead on the second millennium BCE (57-58). "No Greek will be able / to discriminate...