The Postwar American Poet's Library: An Archival Consideration with Charles Olson and the Maud/Olson Library

Abstract

Book history follows the principle of an entropic universe: cohesion succumbs to eventual diffusion. The flow of historical materials between people, institutions, and spaces renders our records “atomized, pulled apart, stored in separate containers, making it much harder for us to inhabit coherent stories, to make sense of ourselves, our history, and the times we live in.”1 In the mid-twentieth century, the poet Charles Olson came to a similar conclusion during his scholarship on Herman Melville and in particular, Melville’s reading practices. Because of financial troubles, after his 1891 death Melville’s family sold his richly annotated library to dealers all over the East Coast. Beginning in 1933, Olson began to identify and gather these books from booksellers. In reconstituting this collection, he was one of the first scholars to encounter Melville’s reading notes—sometimes mere “x” marks in the margin, but as in the case of his copies of Shakespeare, sometimes revealingly annotated.2 During his graduate work at Harvard’s doctoral program in American Civilization from 1936 until 1939, Olson analyzed these annotations alongside Melville’s research on the New England whaling industry, and argued for their fundamental connection to Moby Dick (1851).3 Harvard scholar F.O. Matthiessen (who brought Olson to Harvard) praised Olson’s 1937 essay, “Lear and Moby-Dick” in his classic American Renaissance.4 Olson completed a book-length draft of his scholarship on Melville’s reading practices and library in 1940, placing this material aside as he joined the Office of War Information in 1942 as the Assistant Chief of the Foreign Language Division, a post he resigned in 1944 in protest of government censorship policies. Olson’s manuscript was later published as Call Me Ishmael in 1947,5 and he turned his comprehensive list of Melville’s books over to Merton Sealts, who completed Melville’s Reading (1948)6 by building The Postwar American Poet’s Library  An Archival Consideration with Charles Olson and the Maud/Olson Library