The Secret of the Black Chrysanthemum (Corbin & Poetry Part 14)

I want to call  attention to an indispensable book by Charles Stein: The Secret of the Black Chrysanthemum: The Poetic Cosmology of Charles Olson and His Use of the Writings of C.G. Jung. Barrytown NY: Station Hill Press, 1987.

From the publisher: "This text explores Charles Olson’s visionary poetics and the extensive use he made of the writings of Jung. Offering numerous readings of poems from the “Maximus” series, Stein provides a useful and clearly written introduction to the major themes, cosmological speculations, and poetic inventions of Olson’s work. Using the poet’s notes and marginalia, Stein reveals complex interrelationships of language, geography, and the human body, leading to The Maximus Poems as an archetypal vision of the self."

As an Appendix, Stein has included a facsimile and transcription, along with extensive annotations, of Olson's final piece of writing, which is a “death-bed summation of his concerns and beliefs” dated December 16, 1969, and draws in no small measure on themes from Corbin's “Cyclical Time in Mazdaism and Ismailism” and Avicenna and the Visionary Recital. I here included a scan of the transcribed version which contains references to ta'wil, Ismaili Angelology and the Cinvat Bridge.

The Secret of the Black Chrysanthemum