SOURCE: "Olson's Relation to Pound and Williams," in Contemporary Literature, VOL. 15, No. 1, Winter, 1974, pp. 15-48.

In the following essay, von Hallberg discusses the defining influence of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams on Olson's poetry.

Charles Olson's name comes up often in discussions of the influence of Pound and Williams on younger poets, and rightly so. Shortly before Olson's death, Gerard Malanga asked him whether he could have written The Maximus Poems without having known Pound's and Williams' work. Olson answered: "That's like asking me how I could have written without having read." But there has been so little notice taken of the matters that divided Olson, Pound, and Williams that at least one Poundian has glibly dismissed Olson's poetics as almost wholly derivative and surely inferior to Pound's work. Anyone interested in understanding the course of American poetry over the last sixty or seventy years and the...