4) This are the closing lines of the penultimate poem of The Maximus Poems (Volume 3. Eds. Charles Boer and George F. Butterick. New York: Viking Press, 1975 unpaginated) which come just before the closing lines, "my wife my color my car and myself". This instance of closure is opened up by its relationship to Samson’s final speech in Milton’s Samson Agonistes::

"Happ’n what may, of me expect to hear

Nothing dishonorable, impure, unworthy

Our God, our Law, my nation, or myself;

The last of me or I cannot warrant" (1423-26).

Olson here has constructed himself as a Milton figure. A poet who addressed his nation and who attempted to create a nation of readers ("fit though few"). The previous pages of The Maximus Poems further build on this connection. Olson writes: "but now I am a poet / who thinks more than writes...". I read this as an allusion to both Milton’s and Olson’s emphasis on praxis -- both social and textual. Olson then has moved from an address to his nation as "I, Maximus of Gloucester" to a somewhat despondent poet who is no longer writing. This parallels Milton’s construction as a split figure: the political and spiritual writer and the Restoration defeated revolutionary writer. This intertextual connection opens a different field to view Olson in, one that emphasizes his role as a national poet, one who sought to address his nation at a particular historical juncture (post-war America for Olson, revolutionary and Restoration England for Milton) through an epic poem. And both poets sought out a new form for their national epics: Olson’s postmodernism on the cusp of the modernist intrigue with the relation of the one to the many which utilized an open field composition, drawing on (like Pound) discourses and images from a huge temporal and cultural range. Milton, for his part, used his blank verse for Paradise Lost (and likewise we see Spenser create a unique verse form for his national poem, The Faerie Queene). Olson in some ways inserts himself into literary history through Milton, but he also makes parallels to place himself as a national poet.