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Alison -- not sure if it's moralism, perhaps so -- but in any case, a misunderstanding isn't any less negative simply because it's productive; it's the Hegelian catch-all clause, -positive untruth-; I don't argue that what he thought stopped him writing good poems, just that those poems (and the prose more conspicuously) were rhapsodic to a key fault: no dialectic. If we define myth as inherently dialectical, as we might, then by virtue of that definition Olson is a dialectician -- but by no other virtue, and at the cost of suppressing the evidence of his own manifest reflective tendencies and outright statements. A good counterexample could be (eg) Kevin Nolan's _All Over Susan_: would anyone agree? I don't think Olson could ever have been able to comprehend that agility exactly. Best, k %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%