This thesis offers a new account of Charles Olson’s work on Herman Melville. The argument traces the role of Melville from Olson’s MA thesis and archival research to Call Me Ishmael, through to considerations of this scholarly activity in the making of his poetry. From the 1930s and 40s to the late 1960s, Olson’s compositional practice is associated with the way Melville ‘read to write’. This thesis seeks to delimit the mood or modality of Olson’s practice of reading-to-write. Ishmael and its satellite-texts can be rethought, accordingly, as conjectural answers to the question of Melville’s persistent force in Olson’s responses to Melville. Rather than attempting to reinterpret echoes of Melville in The Maximus Poems and what it means to read the city of Gloucester, this thesis presents new research on Olson’s relation to Melville on either side of the genesis of volumes 1 and 2 of The Maximus Poems, on which existing discussion of Olson’s work has tended to focus. The introduction works through differing conceptions of what it means to read to write, situating Ishmael relative to work with resemblances to it. Olson’s work on Melville’s marginalia emerges as formative for his development as a reader and poet. Chapter 1 is on the interplay of improvisation and self-explanation in Olson’s poetry and the previously undiscussed archive of transcriptions he compiled from 1933-38. The indeterminacy and inscrutability of Melville’s marginalia led to two opposite hermeneutic orientations in sequence, the first reconstructive, the second futural. Chapter 2 is on Olson’s ambivalent relationship with Melville’s prose. This shapes his attempt to start over again with what he thought Melville had left unfulfilled or unrealized in Moby-Dick. Chapter 3 plots the breakdown of this bid to resume what Melville had, supposedly, left unfinished. Olson’s discontent with Melville’s poetry and the last chapters of Ishmael anticipate the conditions in which he wrote the last of The Maximus Poems. I delimit his belated rehabilitation of the older Melville in the later incarnation of the Maximus figure as the night-watchman of Gloucester. Chapter 4 traces Olson’s practice of self-archiving and its connection to the annotations he made in one of his two copies of John Wieners’ Ace of Pentacles. Among the annotations he wrote several poems to his wife, Elizabeth Kaiser, who died in a car crash in March, 1964. He also wrote on one page that he was writing in Ace of Pentacles like Melville had ‘on the leaf of Shakespeare’. I discuss the consequences for readings of the third book of The Maximus Poems. The thesis ends with concluding thoughts on the materiality of Olson’s poetic language, and on his practices of self-archiving.