The Special View of History
Revised and Expanded Edition
Charles Olson (Edited by Ralph Maud and John Faulise)
This book is a revised and expanded edition of Charles Olson’s The Special View of History. Ann Charters produced the first edition of The Special View of History (Berkeley: Oyez, 1970), which is now out of print, when she transcribed, edited, and organized the material from a class Olson taught at Black Mountain College in 1956. Working from material in the Charles Olson Research Collection at the University of Connecticut, Ralph Maud and John Faulise have produced a revised edition that is more accurate than the first, correcting errors in transcription and including material to which Charters did not have access, such as three class presentations from 1956, several shorter sections of text, the San Francisco lecture “The Special View of History Applied to the Two ‘Mysteries’ – of Samothrace and Eleusis,” and the essay “Demeter.” They have arranged the material chronologically for the first time, separating Olson’s 1956 class preparations from material he had prepared for a book proposal on the same topic, and from the 1957 lectures he delivered in San Francisco at the invitation of Robert Duncan. In this material Olson applies Alfred North Whitehead’s Process and Reality to his thinking about history, myth, and the “stance toward reality” he had begun to articulate in his essay “Projective Verse” and other early prose. This edition also features an Introduction by Gary Grieve-Carlson and Afterword by Joshua Hoeynck.
Along with Call Me Ishmael and the essays “Projective Verse” and “Human Universe,” The Special View of History is Olson’s most important work in prose, and his most sustained engagement with Alfred North Whitehead, the philosopher whom Olson called “my great master and the companion of my poems.”
About the Authors
Ralph Maud, a world-renowned expert on the work of Dylan Thomas, Charles Olson, and the ethnographers of the Pacific Northwest, was professor emeritus at Simon Fraser University and founder of the Charles Olson Literary Society. He is the author of Charles Olson’s Reading: A Biography (Southern Illinois, 1996), What Does Not Change: The Significance of Charles Olson’s “The Kingfishers” (Fairleigh Dickinson, 1998), and Charles Olson at the Harbor (Talonbooks, 2008), and the editor of Olson’s Selected Letters (California, 2000), A Charles Olson Reader (Carcanet, 2005), Poet to Publisher: Charles Olson’s Correspondence with Don Allen (Talonbooks, 2005), Muthologos: The Collected Lectures and Interviews (Talonbooks, 2010), and co-editor (with Sharon Thesen) of Charles Olson and Frances Boldereff: A Modern Correspondence (Wesleyan, 1999) and After Completion: The Later Letters of Charles Olson and Frances Boldereff (Talonbooks, 2014).
John Faulise studied under George Butterick at the University of Connecticut (B.A. 1973) and contributed to his A Guide to the Maximus Poems of Charles Olson (California, 1983), and as a graduate student at SUNY Binghamton (M.A. 1975) was an assistant to the editor for Boundary 2: A Journal of Postmodern Literature’s special Olson issue. He is a recipient of a Charles Olson Award from Simon Fraser University, and he was instrumental in the creation of the Maud/Olson Library at the Cape Ann Museum in Gloucester, Massachusetts. He was invited by Ralph Maud to join him as co-editor of The Special View of History, and after Ralph’s death he brought the project to completion. He is currently at work editing the correspondence of Charles Olson and George F. Butterick.
Gary Grieve-Carlson is Professor Emeritus of English at Lebanon Valley College, where he served as interim vice-president for academic affairs (2004-05) and Director of General Education (2001-13). He received the Lindback Distinguished Teaching Award from Lebanon Valley College in 1992, the Hodges Award for Outstanding Teaching by an Instructor from the University of Tennessee in 1990, and the Sproat Award for Excellence in Teaching by a Graduate Student from Boston University in 1983. He has essays forthcoming on Charles Olson and Alfred North Whitehead in The Arizona Quarterly, on Randall Jarrell in Philosophy and Literature, and on Shakespeare’s Richard II in The Midwest Quarterly.
Joshua Hoeynck’s research focuses primarily on the confluences between process philosophy, Black Mountain poetry, and environmental criticism. His work has appeared in The New American Poetry: Fifty Years Later, Contemporary Literature, and The Blackwell Companion to American Poetry. He is the editor of Staying Open: Charles Olson’s Sources and Influences (Vernon Press, 2019). As co-director of the Charles Olson Society, he organizes annual panels at the Re-Viewing Black Mountain College Conference, The Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture, and the American Literature Association Conference. He teaches writing and literature at Case Western Reserve University, with courses on the American Western, the history of ecology in American literature, and Magical Realism.
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Details
Published: March 2026
Formats
Hardback
ISBN: 978-1-63804-207-5
eBook
ISBN: 978-1-63804-208-2
Subjects
Literature