‘From him only will the old State-secret Come': What Charles Olson Imagined

In the ‘FIRST FACT’ of Call Me Ishmael, Olson depicted the cost of American capital on individual bodies flung far from centres of wealth and power. In ‘Apollonius of Tyana’, he argued for a new understanding of human physiology, setting that argument amid a competition for resources centred on the Middle East. Against the background of these interests, and with his explicit preoccupation with international politics in mind, this essay proposes that in Olson's early work we find a language through which American poetry can begin to speak to recent American foreign policy.