The Principle of Measure in Composition by Field

Overview

Editor Joshua Hoeynck has given the poetry world great service by uncovering two key essays from the Charles Olson Archive at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, that together form PROJECTIVE VERSE II, an important continuation of one of Olson's most important poetic works. Olson writes "that the conceptual, no matter how 'mental,' and as such the dipolar to perception, still a powerful discrimination is basic, it is this, the actualities have to be felt, while the pure potentials can be dismissed. This the great distinction between an actual entity (nothing is there except for feeling) and an eternal object (idea). A poem is made up of both." This essay brings the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead into the central work of Olson's thinking about poetics.

Author Biography

Charles Olson is one of America's greatest poets. Born in 1910 and died 1970, he is famous for transforming the definition of the poem, to that of a "field" characterized by the energies of its language, so that the entire work is a work of kinetic energy. He was rector of Black Mountain College in its final years, and he remains the central figure of Black Mountain poetry and poetics.