Charles Olson and Ezra Pound: An Encounter at St. Elizabeths by Charles Olson

Hardcover. Condition: Near Fine, Dust Jacket: Very Good 1975. Grossman Publishers. 1st Edition.

When Ezra Pound, saved from a criminal trial on grounds of insanity, was hospitlized in 1945 at St. Elizabeths in Washington, the Young Poet Charles Olson went to visit him. They became friends.

During many months of regular visits the two would argue about poetry, politics, life, and Olson, in at attempt to reach an understanding of this great and enigmatic poet, kept a record of these visits in notes, diaries, poems.

That material, most of it never before published, is the basis of this extraordinarily revealing book.

Catherine Seelye, working in the voluminous personal papers Olson left after his death, has carefully edited the poet's notebooks to give us a touching and vivid portrait of young Olson and an insight toward an understanding of the greatest figure of the 20th century poetry during his most controversial years.

Olson's sincere effort to understand Pound and his attempt to resolve his own conflict between profound admiration for the poet and contempt for the facist and traitor are manifest here.