Poetry about simple truths captures what life rarely teaches in time: that the answers we seek are often the ones we’ve ignored the longest. This essay explores Charles Olson’s reckoning, in his poem Maximus, to himself, with delayed wisdom, the cost of chasing complexity, and the quiet revelations found in stillness.
The Cost of Learning Life’s Simplest Lessons Too Late
In life it seems that there are lessons we should have learned first, but because of some strange wiring in us or some gravitational pull toward detours, we only learn them last, if we learn them at all.
I think of the struggles I often had in social situations and the overwhelming and often crippling social anxiety that would seize me and rob me of experience, and the simple lesson I learned from Emerson early in my door to door sales career, “do the thing you fear and the death of fear is certain,” and how free I now feel in these exact same social situations.
Getting along with people is one of those completely fundamental lessons that took me over 36 years to learn.
This idea of learning to late is what grounds Charles Olson in his poem Maximus, to himself.
Here we see the speaker Maximus of Tyre (who is always Olson himself) sitting inside this realization with tinges of bitterness and self-pity but with the heavy unadorned weight of a man who has lived long enough to see that the simplest truths, the ones that might have saved us or freed us, were always the ones we chose to set aside.
I have had to learn the simplest things last.
This isn’t a line marred in lament for being too slow, like the embarrassment of the being the student who raises his hand last for the answer; it’s a deeper and more fundamental grief, that of realizing that what he needed was always close at hand like the glass of water on the bedside table you forget about until you wake up dying of thirst.
It is a line that echoes that stark feeling of remembering that you forgot to call that old friend, until you find their number on an old scrape of paper when you’re cleaning out your desk, and by then, realizing, maybe, its already too late.
Olson’s line doesn’t just hold regret, it opens the door to a whole body of poetry about simple truths, learned too late and ignored too long.
Read more about what difficult poetry can teach us.
I have had to learn the simplest things last.
Charles Olson
Why We Chase Complexity Instead of Reading Poetry About Simple Truths
The world, it seems, trains us into complexity, into seeking something beyond simplicity, and it doesn’t seem like its malicious, but its just what happens when enough people mistake constant movement for meaning.
We are taught to decode and to abstract, seeking out the sophisticated answer and the 30,000 foot view, always climbing some invisible tower so certain that wisdom comes with altitude.
However, running counter to this, is Olson’s views on wisdom in the poem; the illusion is that wisdom is something obtained on a mountaintop but he sees it down low, in the dirt and the weather and the salt air beside the sea, its in those things that don’t dress themselves up or beg for our admiration.
Those are the things that if you aren’t careful, you’ll trip over without ever noticing they were the things you needed most.
The illusion is that wisdom comes from altitude. Olson finds it in the dirt and the salt air.
It’s almost like there is a certain kind of safety in complexity, that if I can only turn my life into a tangle of goals and contingencies, and if I can lose myself in systems, theories, and the delicate architecture of cleverness then I won’t have to stand vulnerable before the bare and terrible fact of existence itself.
Existence asks nothing more of me but to be and love and lose and then endure, so it seems like it is far easier to try to build a life, strive for something complex, than to inhabit the one I have and dwell in the present: the warmth and taste of the coffee, the sound of the early morning wind, and the feeling of my back against the couch.
It is so easy to lose this real feeling of presence, of dwelling, the kind that roots us and restores and reconciles, and flirt with the future in dreams and abstraction, but as this poem shows that this presence often begins with poetry about simple truths and not the productivity of chasing or building.
The Dangerous Illusion of Mastery Without Belonging
Olson’s sorrow in this poem is that he mistook the harder thing for the lesser thing.
It is that he, and maybe we, have spent so many years throwing words against words, piling thought on thought, and all the while the simplest apprenticeship, the real one, has sat unattended, and even in what should have been home, the trade of words, the beloved hammer and anvil of poetry itself, Olson has felt estranged:
Even my trade, at it, I stood estranged from that which was most familiar.
There’s something almost unbearable in that admission, it’s that you can throw your whole body into something, years and decades, and still find yourself at a remove, like a guest wandering the corridors of a house that should have been your own.
It reminds me of Eliot’s admission in “East Coker” of those “twenty years, largely wasted” when he’s reflecting on his own writing.
We often imagine, don’t we, that immersion brings belonging?
That if we could only love hard enough and work long enough that the distance between us and what we love will close itself, but sometimes the very act of striving deepens the distance, and sometimes, the harder you work to “master” a thing like a craft, a life, or a love, the more it slips through your hands.
Mastery and intimacy are not the same.
What we see is that mastery and intimacy are not the same, and that estrangement, Olson teaches us, is not the exception, but the air we breathe.
To be human, it seems, is to often be a visitor, even to your own life, and sometimes, what invites you back to yourself is not analysis, but the slow, patient presence of poetry about simple truths.
The Quick Ones
All of the the lamenting in this poem is highlighted when he looks around and sees the quick ones, those agile ones, who move through life and the world like oil moves through the gears of the engine:
The agilities they show daily who do the world’s businesses
He almost marvels at them, those who do the world’s business and nature’s business with ease, all while he fumbles at the door, trying to remember which key fits which lock.
Its not envy exactly that he is feeling but more like the stark recognition that holding that kind of fluency is simply not his, and perhaps it never will be.
We come to see that this agility may not be even the point, as all the world rewards the agile ones, business success and social standing, accolades, all of these wait at the end of clever and quick feet, but the sad fact is that agility is not wisdom.
Having fluency in the world’s transactions is not the same as knowing what it means to stand still in your own skin and say here I am, blemishes and all.
It is this pause, this sacred witnessing of the self in all its goodness and defects, that poetry knows intimately, because poetry about simple truths isn’t about speed but about stillness.
Real Knowledge Is Lived, Not Learned
Olson had made dialogues, argued ancient texts, and thrown what light he could on the problem of being alive, and yet when he looks back, the real knowledge, the known, didn’t come through brilliance or an academic understanding but it came, simply, through life itself.
The real known stuff came trough the love offered and the love denied, through being welcomed and being turned away, and it came perhaps most importantly, through standing bare in all that incompleteness before another human being and asking nothing and proving nothing.
This is the education that life enrolls us in without our consent, the education of being wounded and forgiven and lost and found.
We are thrown into this, to use Heidegger’s terminology, and its not the syllabus we thought we had signed up for, the mastery of the craft and the work with all its neat categories and predicable exams.
Read more about Heidegger’s idea of thrownness.
No, life’s curriculum is much more simple and brutal and ultimately beautiful, and it teaches first by breaking whatever neatness we have tried to carry.
The Hard Truth: There Is No Final Mastery
Even at the end, Olson doesn’t write like a man who has achieved anything final as there is no tidy bow or gold star; standing at the ocean’s edge, he says:
It is undone business I speak of
With the sea stretching out, endless and indifferent, at his feet.
The great illusion is that life has a finish line, that if we work hard enough or smart enough or purely enough, we will arrive somewhere and we will finally feel complete, polished, and whole.
Olson knows better, he knows that the undone business is this life and the unfinished work is the only work there is.
We are never finished in this business of life and Olson finally realizes that maybe we shouldn’t be, that all his striving has lead not to a bitterness but to some kind of clear-eyed freedom.
To be unfinished means that we are still open, still breathing, and still becoming, and sometimes, poetry is the only thing that names that ache and steadies the hand, because in the quiet of its cadence, there is poetry about simple truths, not as answer, but as presence.
Returning to the Simple Things We Forgot
In this, there is the simplest truth of all: that the most important task in life is not to perfect ourselves, but to descend back down into the simple things like the breath, the earth, and the love and loss, and allow ourselves to be reshaped by them, to return to the place we never really left, but only forgot.
Maybe all the undone business Olson speaks of is really just that we never made time for poetry about simple truths, and now that we’re ready, it’s what we need most.
It is far easier to build a life than to inhabit one.
What’s a simple truth you had to learn the hard way, one that was always near, but took you years to see clearly? Let me know in the comments below.
Craving a deeper dive into how language becomes a tool for survival? Explore the full framework in Poetry for Emotional Healing, your guide to reading as renewal.
More like this…
Don’t miss a thing…
Follow me on X, Instagram, and Threads for daily fragments on poetry, power, and self-reinvention. Or better yet, subscribe to samuelgilpin.com and get essays on creative identity, philosophical clarity, and poetic intelligence delivered straight to your inbox.
Ready to burn your default thinking? Download Dangerous by Design. Discover the 10 books that fracture, interrupt, and rewire the creative mind. Get the guide & read dangerously. Or sign up for The 5-Day Poetic Reset.
Dr. Samuel Gilpin is a poet and essayist who walked away from the academy to write at the edge; where poetry meets philosophy and transformation starts with ruin. At samuelgilpin.com, he explores the deep architecture of change, not with hacks or hype, but with language that sharpens and thought that lingers. He holds a PhD in English literature, but what he offers isn’t academic; it’s personal, raw, and precise. When he’s not writing, he’s reading Eliot for the hundredth time, rewatching The Wire, or lifting weights. Download his free guide, Dangerous by Design, and start reading like your mind depends on it. Or sign up for his free course, The 5-Day Poetic Reset.
Pingback: The Poetics of Fulfillment: Why Chasing Happiness Is Killing Your Fulfillment (And How to Stop) - Samuel Gilpin
Pingback: Most of Us Fail: Olson’s Brutal Truth on Form as Life - Dr. Samuel Gilpin
Pingback: Poetry About Endurance: Why Your Pain Still Haunts You - Dr. Samuel Gilpin
Pingback: Poetry for Emotional Healing: As Self-Help Fails, The Poem Begins - Dr. Samuel Gilpin