I knew the poet Willmar Olson and worked as his secretary , answering mail and helping him with paperwork, in the late 1970s when he was at the height of his powers and reputation.

Today Olsons's work is unjustly ignored, yet before he withdrew his works from circulation in 1983 and buried them in a copse of conifer trees in northern Minnesota, he was America's best-known dog poet, winning the Birch Award for his song cycle Weimariner Pause in 1979.

While many suppose The Birch Award takes its name from a famous writer named Birch, it is actually an industry award given to an book of verse that sells more than 750 copies. Weimariner Pause "went birch" in only twelve years, selling an astonishing 1,250 copies before Olson withdrew it from circulation, as his misanthropism and appetite for seclusion slowly enveloped him.

Olson died in 1983, and his bones, those that could be located, are interred in the Manfred Firs of the northlands. As the executor of his estate, and one of the few humans with whom he would associate, I was fortunate to come into possession of several unpublished dog poems, which I include in this eulogy.

Those who remember Olson remember, as I do, a giant of a man who lived and wrote in the forest with a pack of dogs. Those who don't remember him, and are vulgar enough to suggest that he was merely a figment in hip-waders -- well, you just don't know. As one of the few humans he would tolerate, I can shed much light on this powerful but reclusive poet.

Willmar Olson was big in every sense of the word. Six foot nine in his bare feet, which was how we usually saw him, but big also in spirit and in heart. In the creature he loved best he found a totem of perfect pride and perfect purpose. Consider "The Dance of the Dog," his portrait of an ordinary farm dog, happily allying himself with the work of the thresher:

He took great pride in growing his own soybeans and baking his own kibble by the sweat of his brow. Following bean drying season, the wood fires from the oven in the main barn burned around the clock. The recipe contained every nutrient dogs are known to need, Olson claimed. He went extra easy on the salt and fat. "What need hath salt for salt?" he asks, in his roguish short poem, "A Matter of Deference."

The diet resulted in the healthiest dogs I have ever seen One time, returning from town, about eight of the dogs knocked me down and wrested a pair of Tootsie Roll candy bars from my jacket pocket, that I had been saving for the long train ride home. After ripping the candy bars to bits, the dogs took turns licking the wrapper for residue, and sniffing my terrified person for more.

Some critics felt there was a vague misogyny in the man's makeup, and there may be something to that. He once told me that once you had run with the dogs, the love of a woman would never be enough:

Though educated in New Hampshire and supported by air rights revenues from family holdings in the Grand Tetons, Olson downplayed his stentorian origins, creating instead a kind of mythic life focusing his books, his cabin, and his fifty or sixty of dogs, all rescued from area animal shelters.

"I Speak for the Dog," published in 1963, was the collection of poems that made Olson a household name. It contained the much-anthologized "Three Dogs," exquisitely capturing the bathos of postindustrial culture:

Critics compared him to Melville, Kipling, and Cleveland Amory. Publishers bid his books to unbelievable heights. The press hung on his every word. And readers responded, deluging him with dog pictures and proposals of marriage. Tired of the madding crowd, Olson withdrew ever deeper into a private world. He built his north woods estate The Briary with his own hands, and for twenty-six years he made a life there, the most reclusive author this country has ever known.

It was to The Briary that Olson summoned me, to attend to the painful chores of correspondence and, as his trust in me grew, contract negotiation. What I discovered was a man at once shy and proud, who had tendered his immense genius to the care of a pack of dogs. His own manner with his pets was that of lord and master. A dog pleasing to him would earn a scratch behind an ear. A dog who spoke without being spoken to could earn a thump of the man's pipe on the cranium.

What was it about dogs that moved Willmar Olson so? People say it was a vision of moral perfection so stringent that it brooked no compromise. "Our friend the wolf takes what he gets," he said in his poem, "The Wolf." In his eerily theological conceit, "The Dog of God," a disappointed Olson sees all nature as the long-suffering victim of a cruel master:

Working conditions at The Briary were never ideal. Olson did not provide me with an actual desk, but had me work from a card table he set up in the pumphouse. Outside, the dogs milled and fought with one another. In time they came to accept me, although I was never able to keep food on my person. I would spend mornings proofreading the poet's work from the night before, and afternoons with the shovel in the dogyard.

What child has not committed to memory Willmar Olson's classic poem, "Dog in the Manger":