Olson's push, to use his own emphatic and often self-characterizing word, is important. This may be gauged by the fact that anyone wishing to understand recent poetry and writing—post modernism, literature since World War II—has sooner or later to come to him. He is a central figure, a "vortex," rightly compared with Ezra Pound, one of his masters in a preceding generation. (p. xv)

[Olson] was determined to recover beginnings, the origins of new possibilities. His push involved the double work of the great intellectual effort since romanticism—that of reconceiving the nature of the cosmos and the nature of man, to the end not only of overcoming our estrangement from the familiar world (he frequently quotes Heraclitus' "Man is estranged from that with which he is most familiar") but, as was not always the case in earlier attempts to do this, of restoring the humility...