Life & Wisdom Quote by Charles Olson

Self-mythologizing is supposed to be the poet's job, but Olson flips it into a kind of grim credential: he isn't above the cliches, he's made of them. "I'm one of the cliches that has grown up" is a deliberately ugly self-portrait, built to resist the romantic expectation that artists are singular, unrepeatable, exempt. Olson's speaker claims adulthood not as wisdom but as sediment: the slogans, poses, and prefab narratives of a culture have hardened into character. That sting is the point. Calling yourself a cliche is both confession and critique, a refusal to dress self-awareness up as purity.

The line also carries the mid-century American mood Olson wrote through: postwar bigness, mass media, institutional language, the new managerial tone that made even rebellion feel market-ready. Olson, associated with projective verse and the Black Mountain scene, argued for breath, immediacy, and the body as measure. This sentence works as an anti-manifesto: the "I" isn't a heroic origin but a product. It's Olson admitting that the self he wants to project is already crowded with borrowed soundbites.

"Has grown up" lands with special cruelty. We treat cliches as childish, lazy speech; Olson suggests they mature right along with us, getting more plausible, more socially useful, more difficult to spot. The subtext is that adulthood can be a kind of capitulation - not to morality, but to ready-made language. A poet, of all people, naming that trap is both a warning and a dare: if your voice is inherited, earn it anyway.