David Jones and Charles Olson in Time and Space

Abstract

David Jones and Charles Olson concern themselves with large issues of space and time, and how humans are entwined with both. This essay seeks to show that Olson’s project of space and Jones’s with time are very much of the same mettle, that both poems offer a kind of transcendence of one-dimensionality, that time expands to become space, and that, in space, one is confronted with the presence of all time as a simultaneity. The essay addresses Jones’s The Anathemata and a few of his maps and paintings, as well as Olson’s Maximus Poems, particularly its visual / spatial poetics.