SOURCE: "Black Mountain Academy: Charles Olson as Critic and Poet," in The Academic Moment, St. Martin's Press, 1977, pp. 126-38.

In the following excerpt, Thurley faults Olson for what he perceives as superficial and erroneous elements in his poetics.

A number of distinguished poets in the 1950s … received stimulus and direction from Black Mountain College. Although it's hardly possible to define a very clear Black Mountain style, it is possible to use the label to indicate a rough area of preoccupation in postwar American poetry. America has traditionally lacked—it still lacks—a literary centre on the scale of London or Paris, and it is interesting that at least two important poetic movements have originated in, or centred in, the South. Black Mountain may have owed something of its persistent ruralism to its location in Georgia, but it was never a regionalist movement, like the Fugitives. On the contrary...