Charles Olson
Born	(1910-12-27)27 December 1910 Worcester, Massachusetts, U.S.
Died	10 January 1970(1970-01-10) (aged 59) New York City, U.S.
Resting place	Gloucester, Massachusetts
Education	Wesleyan University B.A., 1932; M.A., 1933 Harvard University Graduate work inAmerican Studies, 1936-1939
Genre	Poetry
Literary movement	Postmodernism
Notable works	The Distances,The Maximus Poems
Spouse	Constance (Connie) Wilcock Elizabeth (Betty) Kaiser
Children	2
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Charles John Olson (27 December 1910 – 10 January 1970) was a second generation modernistAmerican poet^[1] who was a link between earliermodernist figures such asEzra Pound andWilliam Carlos Williams and the third generation modernistNew American poets. The latter includes theNew York School, theBlack Mountain School, and some of the artists and poets associated with theBeat generation and theSan Francisco Renaissance.^[1]

Today, Olson remains a central figure of the Black Mountain Poetry school and is generally considered a key figure in moving American poetry from modernism to postmodernism.^[2] In these endeavors, Olson described himself not so much as a poet or a historian but as "an archeologist of morning."^{[3][n 1]}

Olson was born to Karl Joseph and Mary (Hines) Olson and grew up inWorcester, Massachusetts, where his father worked as amail carrier. He spent summers inGloucester, Massachusetts, which was to become his adopted hometown and the focus of his writing. In high school, he was a champion orator, winning a tour of Europe (including a meeting withWilliam Butler Yeats) as a prize.^[4] He studied English literature atWesleyan University, where he graduatedPhi Beta Kappa in 1932 before earning anM.A. in the discipline (with a thesis on the oeuvre ofHerman Melville) in 1933.^[5] After completing his M.A., Olson continued his Melville research at Wesleyan during the 1933–1934 academic year with partial fellowship support. For two years thereafter, he taught English as an instructor atClark University in Worcester, Massachusetts.

Olson enteredHarvard University as a doctoral student in English in 1936. He eventually joined the newly-formed doctoral program inAmerican Civilization as one of its first three candidates. Throughout his studies, he worked atWinthrop House andRadcliffe College as an instructor and tutor in English. Although he completed his coursework by the spring of 1939, he failed to finish his dissertation and take the degree.^[4] He then received the first of twoGuggenheim Fellowships for his studies of Melville; a monograph derived from his master's thesis and subsequent research,Call Me Ishmael, was published in 1947.^[5] His first poems were written in 1940.^[6]

In 1941, Olson moved toNew York City'sGreenwich Village and began living with Constance "Connie" Wilcock in acommon-law marriage; they had one child, Katherine. During this period, he was employed as the publicity director for theAmerican Civil Liberties Union (May 1941 – July 1941) and as chief of the Common Council for American Unity's Foreign Language Information Service (November 1941 – September 1942). At that point, they moved toWashington, D.C., where he worked in the Foreign Language Division of theOffice of War Information, eventually rising to associate chief underAlan Cranston.^[5]

Upset about the increasing censorship of his news releases, Olson went to work for theDemocratic National Committee as director of the Foreign Nationalities Division in May 1944. In this capacity, he participated inFranklin Roosevelt's1944 presidential campaign, organizing "Everyone for Roosevelt", a large campaign rally at New York'sMadison Square Garden. Following Roosevelt's re-election to an unprecedented fourth term, he wintered inKey West, Florida. In January 1945, he was offered his choice of two positions (includingAssistant Secretary of the Treasury and theCabinet-rankPostmaster General) in the Roosevelt administration. Increasingly disenchanted with politics, he turned down both posts.^[7]

The death of Roosevelt and concomitant ascendancy ofHarry Truman in April 1945 inspired Olson to dedicate himself to a literary career.^[4] From 1946 to 1948, Olson visitedEzra Pound atSt. Elizabeths Hospital, drawn to the poet and his work though repelled by some of his political ideas.^[6]

In September 1948, Olson became a visiting professor atBlack Mountain College inNorth Carolina, replacing longtime friendEdward Dahlberg for the academic year. There, he would work and study beside such artists as the composerJohn Cage and the poetRobert Creeley.^[5] He subsequently joined the permanent faculty at the invitation of the student body in 1951 and becameRector shortly thereafter. While at Black Mountain, he had a second child, Charles Peter Olson, with one of his students, Betty Kaiser. Kaiser became Olson's second common-law wife following his separation from Wilcock in 1956.

Despite financial difficulties and Olson's eccentric administrative style, Black Mountain College continued to support work by Cage, Creeley,Allen Ginsberg,Robert Duncan,Fielding Dawson,Cy Twombly,Jonathan Williams,Ed Dorn,Stan Brakhage, and many other members of the 1950s Americanavant-garde throughout Olson's rectorship. Olson's influence has been cited by artists in other media, includingCarolee Schneemann andJames Tenney.^[8]

Olson's ideas came to influence a generation of poets, including writers Duncan, Dorn,Denise Levertov, andPaul Blackburn.^[5] At 204 centimetres (6 ft 8 in), Olson was described as "a bear of a man", his stature possibly influencing the title of hisMaximus work.^[9] Olson wrote copious personal letters and helped and encouraged many young writers. Histransdisciplinary poetics were informed by a range of disparate and learned sources, includingMayan writing,Sumerian religion,classical mythology,Alfred North Whitehead'sprocess philosophy (as exemplified byProcess and Reality [1929]) andcybernetics. Shortly before his death, he examined the possibility that Chinese andIndo-European languages derived from a common source.

When Black Mountain College closed in 1956, Olson oversaw the resolution of the institution's debts over the next five years and settled in Gloucester. He participated in earlypsilocybin experiments under the aegis ofTimothy Leary in 1961^[10] and Henry Murray and served as adistinguished professor at theState University of New York at Buffalo (1963–1965) and visiting professor at theUniversity of Connecticut (1969).^[5] From 1965 until his death, Olson received a generous, informalannuity (nominally rendered for his services as editorial consultant to Frontier Press) from philanthropist and publisher Harvey Brown, a former graduate student at Buffalo; this enabled him to take an indefinite leave of absence from his Buffalo professorship and return to Gloucester.^[11]

On March 28, 1964, Kaiser was killed by a drunk driver in a head-on automobile accident,^[12] although a grieving Olson incorrectly theorized her death as a potential suicide because of her dissatisfaction with her life in the Buffalo area. Her death precipitated Olson into an existential mixture of extreme isolation, romantic longing, and frenzied work.^[6] Much of his life was affected by his heavy smoking and drinking, which contributed to his early death fromliver cancer. Following his diagnosis, he was transferred toNew York Hospital for a liver operation, which never occurred.^[13] He died there in 1970, two weeks past his fifty-ninth birthday, while in the process of completing his epic,The Maximus Poems.^[14]

Olson's first book,Call Me Ishmael (1947), a study ofHerman Melville's novelMoby Dick, was a continuation of his M.A. thesis atWesleyan University.^[15]

InProjective Verse (1950), Olson called for apoetic meter based on the poet's breathing and an open construction based on sound and the linking of perceptions rather thansyntax andlogic. He favored meter not based on syllable, stress, foot or line but using only the unit of the breath. In this respect Olson was foreshadowed byRalph Waldo Emerson's poetic theory on breath.^[16] The presentation of the poem on the page was for him central to the work becoming at once fully aural and fully visual^[17] The poem "The Kingfishers" is an application of the manifesto. It was first published in 1949 and collected in his first book of poetry,In Cold Hell, in Thicket (1953). His second collection,The Distances, was published in 1960.

Olson's reputation rests in the main on his complex, sometimes difficult poems such as "The Kingfishers", "In Cold Hell, in Thicket", andThe Maximus Poems, work that tends to explore social, historical, and political concerns. His shorter verse, poems such as "Only the Red Fox, Only the Crow", "Other Than", "An Ode on Nativity", "Love", and "The Ring Of" are more immediately accessible and manifest a sincere, original, emotionally powerful voice. "Letter 27 [withheld]" fromThe Maximus Poems weds Olson's lyric, historic, and aesthetic concerns. Olson coined the termpostmodern in a letter of August 1951 to Robert Creeley.

In 1950, inspired by the example of Pound'sCantos (though Olson denied any direct relation between the two epics), Olson began writingThe Maximus Poems. An exploration of American history in the broadest sense,Maximus is also an epic of place, situated inMassachusetts and specifically the city of Gloucester where Olson had settled.Dogtown, the wild, rock-strewn centre ofCape Ann, next to Gloucester, is an important place inThe Maximus Poems. (Olson used to write outside while sitting on a tree-stump in Dogtown.)

The whole work is also mediated through the voice of Maximus, based partly onMaximus of Tyre, an itinerantGreek philosopher, and partly on Olson himself. The last of the three volumes imagines an ideal Gloucester in which communal values have replaced commercial ones. When Olson knew he was dying of cancer, he instructed his literary executor Charles Boer and others to organize and produce the final book in the sequence following Olson's death.^[14]

• Niagara Frontier Review

• Call Me Ishmael. (1947; reprint, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997)
• Projective VersePoetry New York #3 (1950; frequently reprinted)
• The Distances. (New York: Grove Press Inc., 1960)
• Human Universe and Other Essays, ed. Donald Allen (San Francisco: Auerhahn Society, 1965; Rpt. New York: Grove, 1967)
• Selected Writings, ed. Robert Creeley (New York: New Directions, 1966).
• The Maximus Poems 1-10 (Stuttgart: Jargon, 1953).
• The Maximus Poems 11-22 (Stuttgart: Jargon, 1956).
• The Maximus Poems [Volume I] (New York: Corinth Books/Jargon 24, 1960; London: Cape Goliard, 1960).
• Maximus Poems IV, V, VI (London: Cape Goliard, 1968).
• The Special View of History, ed. Ann Charters (Berkeley: Oyez, 1970).
• Archaeologist of Morning (London and New York: Cape Goliard, 1970).
• The Maximus Poems: Volume Three (New York: Viking/Grossman, 1975).
• Charles Olson and Ezra Pound: An Encounter at St. Elizabeths, ed. Catherine Seelye. New York: Viking, 1975ISBN 0-670-52400-X
• The Fiery Hunt and Other Plays (Bolinas: Four Seasons Foundation, 1977).
• The Maximus Poems, ed. George Butternick (Berkeley: U of California Press, 1983).
• The Collected Poems of Charles Olson: Excluding The Maximus Poems, ed. George Butternick (Berkeley: U of California Press, 1987).
• A Nation of Nothing but Poetry: Supplementary Poems, ed. George Butternick (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1989).
• Collected Prose, eds.Donald Allen & Benjamin Friedlander (Berkeley: U of California Press, 1997).
• Muthologos: Lectures and Interviews, ed. Ralph Maud (Talonbooks, 2010).

• Mayan Letters, ed. Robert Creeley (Mallorca: Divers Press, 1953; London: Jonathan Cape, 1968).
• Letters for Origin 1950-1956, ed. Albert Glover (New York: Cape Goliard, 1970).
• Charles Olson and Robert Creeley: The Complete Correspondence, eds. George F. Butterick & Richard Blevins, 10 vols. (Black Sparrow Press, 1980–96).
• Charles Olson & Cid Corman: Complete Correspondence 1950-1964, ed. George Evans, 2 vols. (Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation, 1987, 1991).
• In Love, In Sorrow: The Complete Correspondence of Charles Olson and Edward Dahlberg, ed. Paul Christensen (New York: Paragon House, 1990).
• Charles Olson and Frances Boldereff: A Modern Correspondence, eds. Ralph Maud & Sharon Thesen (Wesleyan University Press, 1999).
• Selected Letters, ed. Ralph Maud (Berkeley: U of California Press, 2001).
• After Completion: The Later Letters of Charles Olson and Frances Boldereff, eds. Sharon Thesen & Ralph Maud (Talonbooks, 2014).
• An Open Map: The Correspondence of Robert Duncan and Charles Olson, eds. Robert J. Bertholf & Dale M. Smith (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2017).
• The Collected Letters of Charles Olson and J.H. Prynne, ed. Ryan Dobran (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2017).

• Boer, Charles.Charles Olson in Connecticut (1975; North Carolina Wesleyan Press, rpt. 1991).
• Butterick, George F.A Guide to the Maximus Poems. (University of California Press, 1981).
• Clark, Tom.Charles Olson: The Allegory of a Poet's Life (W. W. Norton, 1991).
• Hinton, David.The Wilds of Poetry: Adventures in Mind and Landscape (Shambala, 2017).
• Kinniburgh, Mary Catherine. (2022).Wild Intelligence : Poets’ Libraries and the Politics of Knowledge in Postwar America. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.
• Maud, Ralph.Charles Olson's Reading: A Biography (Southern Illinois UP, 1996).
• Maud, Ralph.Charles Olson at the Harbor (Talonbooks, 2007), biographical corrections of Clark.
• Merrill, Thomas F.The Poetry of Charles Olson: A Primer (Delaware, 1982).
• Paul, Sherman.Olson's Push: Origin, Black Mountain, and Recent American Poetry (Louisiana State University Press, 1978).

Wikiquote has quotations related toCharles Olson.

• Olson Biography, University of Connecticut
• Olson profile at Academy of American Poets. Retrieved 2010-12-12
• Profile at Poetry Foundation. Retrieved 2010-12-12
• Olson at Modern American PoetryArchived 2009-01-16 at theWayback Machine. Retrieved 2010-12-12
• Read Olson's interview withThe Paris Review. Retrieved 2010-12-12
• Finding aid for the Charles Olson Research Collection at theUniversity of Connecticut Archives and Special Collections
• "Charles Olson in the Tradition of Walt Whitman", Essay on Olson as Visionary Poet. Retrieved 2012-29-02 atarchive.today (archived December 14, 2012)
• Polis Is This: Charles Olson and the Persistence of PlaceArchived 2014-12-18 at theWayback Machine documentary on Olson byHenry Ferrini (1 hr). Retrieved 2010-12-12
• "Charles Olson",Pennsound, a page of Charles Olson recordings. Retrieved 2010-12-12
• Records of Charles Olson are held by Simon Fraser University's Special Collections and Rare BooksArchived 2019-10-16 at theWayback Machine

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