Given the diversity of Olson's interests and preoccupations as a poet, we are confronted with the question: do the life and work of this poet have a design? And if they do, what premise could possibly draw all the relevant details together and make them meaningful, expressive of a single, absorbing concern? Olson's enthusiasms encompass such oddments as Hopi language, Mayan statuary, non-Euclidean geometry, Melville's fiction, the austere thought structures in Whitehead's philosophy, the fragmentary remains of the Sumerian and Hittite civilizations, Norse, Greek, and Egyptian mythology, numerology and the Tarot, the history of human migration, naval and economic history, the etymology of common words, pre-Socratic philosophy, the historical origins of the New England colonies, the development of the fishing industry off the coast of Massachusetts, accounts of the conquest of Mexico, the collapse of the Aztec and Mayan civilizations. The list could be extended. Is there an...