Charles Olson (1910-1970) was a mass of contradictions -- at once egalitarian and elitist, as desperate for the love of a devoted woman as he was haunted by homosexual urges, a lapsed Catholic who eventually drifted into Islamic mysticism and Sumerian studies. In this provocative biography of a poet both feared and revered, Tom Clark shows how these conflicts troubled Olson's life even as it fueled his art.