Charles Olson After Shakespeare

Over the course of a decade that started in the mid-1940s, the ornery, imposing American poet Charles Olson (1910–70) came into his own as a writer. In 1945, he wrote Call Me Ishmael—his “assault” prose essay-poem on Herman Melville by way of Noah, Moses, and Shakespeare (for “assault,” see OLSON: The Journal of the Charles Olson Archive, 5 [1976]). A year later, he began a long series of visits with Ezra Pound, then incarcerated in St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C., and he published poems in Harper’s, Atlantic Monthly, and Harper’s Bazaar. Reynal and Hitchcock published Call Me Ishmael in 1947. Black Sun Press published Olson’s first collection of poems, y & x, in 1948. He had begun to lecture at various writers’ conferences and universities, and to meet other poets (Robert Duncan, Kenneth Rexroth, and Muriel Rukeyser, among them); now he was asked by Josef Albers to give three lectures at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Through the spring of 1949, he was in residence at the college for roughly a week each month. His ambitious “pre-postmodern” (as Ralph Maud puts it) “The Kingfishers,” the poem that would take pride of place at the beginning of Donald Allen’s benchmark The New American Poetry, 1945–1960, also dates from 1949. The following year, Olson wrote his first Maximus poem (“I, Maximus of Gloucester, to You”) and began a voluminous correspondence with Robert Creeley. Then Poetry New York published “Projective Verse,” the ars poetica that Olson had been hashing out in letters to Creeley. Between 1951 and 1956, he was either teaching at or rector of Black Mountain College, where beside Duncan and Creeley, Olson collaborated and argued with, hectored and inspired, the likes of Robert Motherwell, Franz Kline, Robert Rauschenberg, Ben Shahn, Cy Twombly, John Cage, and Merce Cunningham. With the publication of Maximus Poems 1–10 in 1953 and Maximus Poems 11–22 in 1956, the lifelong project that was still ongoing at Olson’s death in 1970 was well launched.

Call Me Ishmael provides us with some of the first published evidence for Olson’s disposition toward Shakespeare. He had been granted an M.A. from Wesleyan University for his 1933 thesis, “The Growth of Herman Melville, Prose Writer and Poetic Thinker.” At the end of that year, the friendship that he had struck up with Eleanor Metcalf, Melville’s granddaughter, led to a December meeting with her sister, Mrs. Frances Osborne. Olson suddenly found himself entrusted with ninety-five volumes that had once been Herman Melville’s own. Among these was the seven-volume Shakespeare edition that Melville read from and marked up just before he began Moby-Dick. Olson’s comprehensive, source-tracking Melville scholarship was on display in a long seminar paper that he would write for F. O. Matthiessen, when he was a graduate student at Harvard in 1936. Later, prodded and scolded by Edward Dahlberg, Olson reworked his paper into “Lear and Moby-Dick,” a twenty-five-page essay that appeared in 1938, in the inaugural issue of Twice A Year. “What was solvent within Melville,” Olson wrote, “Shakespeare, in the manner of a catalytic agent, precipitated.” In Call Me Ishmael, Olson repeats his conviction that the “rough notes for Moby-Dick” appear “in the Shakespeare set itself. They are written in Melville’s hand, in pencil, upon the last fly-leaf of the last volume, the one containing Lear, Othello and Hamlet.”

Traces of Melville’s Shakespeare reading provided Olson with fresh genetic evidence for the transformation in Melville’s writing that occurred with Moby-Dick (“the ferment, Shakespeare, the cause”). We know that reading Shakespeare had occupied Olson, too. When he first met Dahlberg, he made it clear that he “knew pages of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, Lear, Troilus and Cressida, Timon of Athens by rote” (The Confessions of Edward Dahlberg). A folded sheet of paper (now at Simon Fraser University) that Olson covered with notes about Coriolanus (“it is the tragedy of the impolitic, not even of the idealist, but of the insolent egoist”) appears also to date from...