The Principle of Measure in Composition by Field: Projective Verse II

Literary Nonfiction. Poetics. Literary Criticism. Editor Joshua Hoeynck has given the poetry world great service by uncovering two key essays from the Charles Olson Archive at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, that together form PROJECTIVE VERSE II, an important continuation of one of Olson’s most important poetic works. Olson writes that the conceptual, no matter how ‘mental, ’ and as such the dipolar to perception, still a powerful discrimination is basic, it is this, the actualities have to be felt, while the pure potentials can be dismissed. This the great distinction between an actual entity (nothing is there except for feeling) and an eternal object (idea). A poem is made up of both. This essay brings the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead into the central work of Olson’s thinking about poetics