Life & Wisdom Quote by Charles Olson

Olson’s line lands like a rebuke disguised as a confession: the poet as public servant is a tempting costume, and he’s sick of how badly it fits. “You don’t help people in your poems” is less an accusation than a diagnosis of a whole mid-century anxiety about art’s usefulness. Coming out of the Black Mountain orbit, Olson was committed to immediacy, breath, and the lived event of language. That project can feel almost aggressively anti-therapeutic: not “here’s what to feel,” but “here’s what happens when attention is turned all the way up.”

The second sentence swivels from critique to self-indictment. “I’ve been trying to help people all my life - that’s my trouble” turns “help” into a compulsion, a moral habit that curdles into ego, control, or exhaustion. The dash is doing real work: it’s the moment he catches himself, admitting that the urge to be useful can become a private pathology. Olson’s subtext is that poetry, when it tries to “help,” often defaults to instruction, consolation, or uplift - genres that reassure the reader at the cost of flattening experience.

What makes the quote sting is its refusal of sentimental rescue narratives. Olson doesn’t deny ethics; he distrusts the easier ethics of being “for” people in a way that keeps the poet clean. The harder wager is that poems don’t help by delivering aid packages of meaning. They help, if at all, by altering perception - making you less governable by cliché, including the cliché of the good-hearted artist.