Politics & Power Quote by Charles Olson

A little shrug disguised as a compliment: Olson’s line performs deference while quietly refusing to be domesticated by it. He’s “deferring” to other American poets, but the phrase “for some reason” needles the very hierarchy he appears to accept. It’s not that he can’t name the reasons; it’s that naming them would mean consenting to a tidy ranking of influence, a canon with clear winners, a polite lineage. Olson was never a tidy poet. His whole project in the postwar moment (and especially around the Black Mountain orbit) was to break inherited measures and put breath, field, and force back into the poem. Deference is precisely the social gesture he’s suspicious of.

The subtext is the more interesting double-bind: he “envy” and “admire” in the same breath, two emotions that don’t sit comfortably together. Admiration suggests chosen allegiance; envy admits vulnerability, the sting of proximity. Olson isn’t posturing as above comparison. He’s confessing that art is made in a crowd, and that peers can feel like a jury. The line reads like a self-diagnosis of the American poet’s condition in mid-century: trying to invent a new form while still hearing the footsteps of contemporaries down the hall.

That “other” does extra work too. It draws a boundary, as if Olson is half inside the category “American poet” and half resisting it. He wants the tradition, but on his own terms; he wants fellowship, but not obedience. The wit here is not a joke so much as a controlled wince: ambition admitting its nerves while keeping its claws.