In a key episode of his legend, Charles Olson was born as a poet when he died as a political organiser. Beyond this, the relation between Olson's two careers has gone unspecified in narratives of his creative development. The clean break described in Tom Clark's detailed biography has been countered only by perverse portraits such as Robert von Hallberg's otherwise shrewd account, which presents the poet as an uncritical politically centrist defender of US imperialism, unreconstructed from his days as a New Dealer – a view that has persisted to the present day, as in Heriberto Yépez's less incisive Empire of Neomemory. All accounts either see Olson breaking from politics or continuing already established liberal-democratic convictions in the humanities. The key question regarding Olson, still, concerns what he considered himself to have left behind, and what aspects of the category ‘political organiser’ we might consider him to have pursued in poetry, prose and wider cultural practices where, famously, ‘the affairs of men remain a chief concern’. The argument of this chapter is that Olson abandoned what he called ‘the trick of politics’ being staged in an increasingly corporate and bureaucratic party-political system for a more meaningful sense of the political where his agency could register actively in a particular constituency. Explaining his decision to become a poet in a letter to Ruth Benedict, Olson makes such a motive clear from the outset:

This early vision of polis, and of the role the poet might play in ‘social action’ from within it, gives us the germ of a concern that would occupy Olson throughout his writing career.