Charles Olson and Ezra Pound: An Encounter at St. Elizabeths

xxvi, 147 pp. "Seelye tells us that Olson intended to publish the account of his historic 1946 encounter with Pound--just after his conviction as a traitor and incarceration at St. Elizabeth's--after the older poet's death. But Olson's death was to precede Pound's by two years, and his unpublished work (including the soon-to-appear third volume of the Maximus poems) is only now becoming available. This brief diary--mostly in the form of poems and ten prose ""cantos""--is exciting on many levels. Olson was Pound's first visitor and recognized his obligation to communicate not only his mixed feelings about the ""revolutionary simpleton"" (Yeats' words), the anti-Semitic fascist who invented modern poetry, but also to transcribe verbatim the conversations--often one-sided with old Ez magna voce--between the two. Thus we have here new material on the Pound case--his motives, his stability, the degree to which he may have recanted his views or regretted his broadcasts for Mussolini. But, as Seelye presents it, this is ""not just another Pound book"" (as if it would be only another. . .), since these virtually weekly meetings coincided with Olson's decision to abandon a highly successful career in New Deal politics for poetry. Pound encouraged the publication of Olson's Melville study (Call Me Ishmael, 1947) and his paternal influence would later be felt in the pivotal essay on ""Projective Verse"" and the historical structure of the Maxirnus poems; apparently Olson even adapted Pound's economics to his own democratic impulse. To read these notes--some completed, some fragmentary, all well served by Seelye's annotations--is to be situated on the axis of mid-century poetry, degree zero, absolutely there."