Charles Olson’s Mappemunde

This chapter argues that Charles Olson’s sprawling late modernist epic, The Maximus Poems (1960-75) is informed by a profound preoccupation with geography that is focused upon a particular place: the port city of Gloucester, Massachusetts and the neighbouring peninsula of Cape Ann. The deep history of Gloucester that Olson undertakes in the first volume of his text, focusing upon the city’s origins as a colonial settlement in the early seventeenth century, is a necessary prelude to the more expansive and fragmentary mytho-historical parallels that he draws between places in the Eastern Mediterranean and the North Atlantic in volumes two and three. Moreover, Olson’s fascination navigators’ charts, sea voyages, and westward migrations in The Maximus Poems suggests that we might read his text as a map of the world – a late modernist mappamundi – that has been made by the restless wanderings of what he calls ‘Western man’.