"Fact is based upon vulgar matter"
About this Quote
Olson’s line takes a swing at the self-serious authority of “facts” by dragging them back down into the grit they’re made of. “Vulgar matter” isn’t just a sneer; it’s a reminder that facts don’t arrive as clean, floating truths. They’re hammered out of bodies, weather, labor, money, paperwork, sex, hunger, geography - the unpoetic stuff polite culture tries to edit away. By calling matter “vulgar,” Olson is prodding the reader to notice the classed, moralized filter we slap on reality: what counts as respectable knowledge is often what can be abstracted from mess.
As a poet of projective verse and a major force in postwar American experimental writing, Olson was suspicious of inherited forms and the genteel “museum” version of culture. In that context, this aphorism reads like a manifesto. It argues that the real is not an idea but a material event, and that art worth anything has to stay in contact with the world’s coarse textures rather than laundering them into tasteful generalities. The phrase also needles the era’s midcentury faith in managerial expertise: “fact” sounds neutral until you ask who is collecting it, from where, and for what purpose.
The punch of the sentence is its reversal. We tend to treat matter as crude and fact as refined. Olson flips the hierarchy: the vulgar is the foundation. Your certainty, he implies, is built on mud.
As a poet of projective verse and a major force in postwar American experimental writing, Olson was suspicious of inherited forms and the genteel “museum” version of culture. In that context, this aphorism reads like a manifesto. It argues that the real is not an idea but a material event, and that art worth anything has to stay in contact with the world’s coarse textures rather than laundering them into tasteful generalities. The phrase also needles the era’s midcentury faith in managerial expertise: “fact” sounds neutral until you ask who is collecting it, from where, and for what purpose.
The punch of the sentence is its reversal. We tend to treat matter as crude and fact as refined. Olson flips the hierarchy: the vulgar is the foundation. Your certainty, he implies, is built on mud.
Quote Details
| Topic | Truth |
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