The Complete Correspondence: Volume 2

Two great poets thinking through life and literature in an unequalled correspondence: Charles Olson & Robert Creeley: The Complete Correspondence: Volume 2.

The ten-volume Charles Olson & Robert Creeley: The Complete Correspondence is an enormously valuable, often thrilling, record of the friendship between two major poets, their greatest work largely still ahead of them both. Working out their thoughts in letters, Olson credited Creeley with formulating one of the basic principles of a new poetry: the idea that “form is never more than an extension of content.” But there was also the larger issue of how a man of language must live in the world.

The correspondence covers periods when both men were unsettled―Creeley restlessly moving his young family around isolated Mediterranean villages, Olson drifting indecisively between conflicting roles as mentor at Black Mountain and writer in Washington, D.C. Throughout, however, there is an intense, single-minded dedication to poetry and the unique difficulties of putting into language the creative rhythms of conscious thought. This collection of uncommon richness will charm, challenge and inspire.

Charles Olson was one of the most innovative poets of the 20th century. As a teacher at the Black Mountain College, he was one of the three most influential members of the Black Mountain movement, along with Robert Duncan and Robert Creeley. "Creeley and I have since engaged in perhaps the most important correspondence of my life,” Olson told a friend in 1950. Creeley, in his turn, found Olson's letters "of such energy and calculation that they constituted a practical 'college' of stimulus and information.”

Robert Creeley was a major American poet, essayist, and editor. He first met Charles Olson at Black Mountain College where, Creeley joked, Olson was referred to as "Maximus" and he was called "Minimus" due to their teacher-apprentice relationship. A close friendship followed, documented in the ten-volume collected correspondence. Creely wrote, "The letters...were really my education just because their range and articulation took me into terms of writing and many other areas indeed where I otherwise might never have entered."

George F. Butterick was an authority on the poet Charles Olson, edited Olson’s The Maximus Poem and at the time of his death was working on a biography of the poet. He received the American Book Award for his Collected Poems of Charles Olson, published in 1987. He was a a lecturer in English and curator of the Literary Archives at the University of Connecticut.