SOURCE: "Charles Olson and the Postmodern Advance," in Iowa Review, Vol. 11, No. 4, Fall, 1980, pp. 4-27.

In the following essay, Butterick examines how Olson attempted to break with traditional western rationalism.

Charles Olson was always very pleased by the fact that the only time he was ever given a psychological test—when he was invited to participate along with twenty-three other poets, including William Carlos Williams, Robert Lowell, and the like, as part of an examination of creativity conducted by a Harvard graduate student—the results of the test confirmed that he had a "high tolerance of disorder." The experiment was administered in 1950 by Robert N. Wilson, working under Olson's friend and fellow Melville scholar, Henry A. Murray, father of the widely known Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), and consisted of an interview and modified form of the TAT, in which visual patterns are explored and narrated. Not insignificantly, it...