BOOKS
313
TWO POUNDS
CHARLES OLSON
&
EZRA POUND: AN ENCOUNTER AT
ST.
ELiZABETHS.
By Charles Olson. Edited by Catherine Seelye. Gross–
manlViking. $11.95.
Charles Olson-who passed away in 1970, two years before
Ezra Pound-has left us an illuminating, Open Field-fashioned jour–
nal consisting mostly of notes and fragments recorded during the first
three years of Pound's incarceration at St. Elizabeths, Washington's
federal institution for the insane. Pound, saved from a treason trial on
the grounds of insanity, was to spend some thirteen years, "one quarter
of his writing life," as a prisoner at St. Elizabeths, sane enough to suffer
the pangs of internment but not sane enough to be released. When he
was finally released in the spring of 1958, it was because the District
Court overruled itself. Pound was found "incurably insane" and the
indictment against hIm was quashed.
Olson's initial 'encounter with the elder statesman of modern verse
on January 4, 1946, was hardly propitious. At first glance the two poets
appeared to have little in common. "The one," editor Catherine Seelye
points out, "was bitter and old, nearing the sad end of a great career;
the other was searching for some new means to an uncertain end."
Olson, only thirty-five, had barely broken literary ground; his ceuvre in
1946 consisted of four published poems and two essays, while Pound's
main literary concern, at sixty, was how best to complete
The Cantos,
how to write a paradise while incarcerated in purgaLOry.
Maximus,
Moby Dick,
and Black Mountain lay before Olson, Pound's major
work lay behind.
Such detai ls as age and experience, however, had never seemed LO
mean much LO Pound. In 1909, armed with an introduction from
Olivia Shakespear he presented himself LO Yeats, twenty years his
senior. Within a matter of months Pound was editing "old Billyum's"
work, instructing him in ways of being more modern, helping him
find his way out of the semi-darkness of the Celtic Twilight. Olson, on
the other hand, was much more aware than Pound had ever been of
such social amenities as seniority and past performance. He was also
extremely conscious of the dichotomy which existed between Pound as
