Early versions of a remarkable literary project
OLSON, Charles. The Maximus Poems. Stuttgart: Jonathan Williams. 1953, 1956.
8vo. 2 vols. Card wrappers with calligraphic design; pp. I: [vi], 46; II: [iv], 51; placed into the first volume is a loose sheet which contains an introduction by the poet Robert Creeley; on edges of second volume are signs of tape repairs to splits in paper and minor creasing; otherwise very good.
First volume is one of 300 copies printed in Jargon 7, second volume is one of 350 copies in Jargon 9.
Beginning the composition of his opus, The Maximus Poems, in 1940, Olson would continue to work and revise this remarkable literary project until his death in 1970. Drawing comparisons to Ezra Pound's Cantos, Maximus became a three-volume single poem written by one of the primary founders of the Black Mountain Poets movement. Olson's tract on subversive poetics refuting the laws of conventional form, 'Projective Verse' was considered a manifesto for this chain of interrelated writers and his death a marker of the movement's demise.
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