If the poetic method of Charles Olson's sprawling late modernist epic, The Maximus Poems, is fundamentally historical in character, then it is also informed by a profound, but less-remarked preoccupation with geography. Famously, Olson derives his conception of history from Herodotus, translating ‘istorin as a verb rather than a noun; history means ‘“finding out for oneself,” instead of depending on hearsay’. It is significant, however, that much of what Olson seeks to find out for himself in the more than 600 pages of The Maximus Poems concerns a particular place – the port city of Gloucester, Massachusetts, and the neighbouring peninsula of Cape Ann. Of course, the scope of Olson's omnivorous imagination is such that his text is about many other things besides – from pre-Homeric cultures and Jungian psychology to theories of continental drift. Nonetheless, most of these interests are loosely connected to the poem's core geographical themes of westward voyages and migrations, which tend to converge on the North Atlantic coast of New England. The deep history of place that Olson undertakes in the first volume of The Maximus Poems (1960), focusing upon the origins of Gloucester as a colonial settlement in the early seventeenth century, is a necessary prelude to the much more expansive and fragmentary mytho-historical parallels that he draws between places in the Eastern Mediterranean and the North Atlantic in Maximus IV, V, VI (1968), and The Maximus Poems: Volume Three (1975). Moreover, among the multifarious documents and sources that Olson's epic plunders for material or inspiration, the maps drawn by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century navigators have an important, even central place. In this chapter, I argue that Olson's recurrent fascination with these (and other) maps of Gloucester, New England, and the wider Atlantic world has far-reaching effects not only on the content of The Maximus Poems but also on its form. For, one of the ways in which the poet encourages us to read his text is as a map of the world – a late modernist mappamundi – that has been made and remade by the ‘restless’ wanderings of ‘Western man’.

Given the monumental scale and ‘textual depth’ of The Maximus Poems, which evolved over the course of twenty years and remained unfinished at the time of Olson's death in 1970, it is no surprise that the text's poetics of place is complex and at times deeply contradictory.