Olson's positioning as a political poet was rare in the 1950s, even within the burgeoning avant-garde renaissance that became known as the New American Poetry. Events in Vietnam in the 1960s, however, at once a culmination of post-war foreign policy and a shock to the system of the body politic, would soon change attitudes to artistic political commitment. Olson's convictions on these issues would turn out to be prescient of what many Americans came to feel Vietnam represented: that US post-war internationalism was an imperial force all along. Nonetheless, the attempt by poets to work out a relationship with US imperialism in the wake of the war was a famously troubled episode. On the one hand, the uncritical patriotism implicit in Donald Allen's description in The New American Poetry of ‘our avant-garde’ no longer held water, but on the other the nature of the distance from the nation threatened to alienate poets from politics altogether. The late sixties’ various enthusiasms for and disillusionments with politically detached and politically committed poetry raised questions about the priorities of the only recently rebegun experimental project in American poetry, making the event central for evaluating the post-war response of avantgarde aesthetics to political crisis. Evaluations of the period have tended to focus on the splitting effect the war had on poetics, and the damage a polarised poetic community did to poets’ critical thinking about poetry's public function. Though antagonism was undoubtedly keenly felt, and a dominant note in arguments as they unfolded, I want also to explore here how apparently irreconcilable differences were exacerbated by agreement. That is, avant-garde poetry's response to Vietnam can show us the often uninterrogated premises on which argument about political poetry took place, such as the opposition between individual conscience and realpolitik, at a certain point in the history of vanguard poetics (and possibly its endpoint).