Charles Olson Collection (VMF129), 1965 | MSS Manuscripts

Olson, Charles (1910-1970)

Charles Olson (December 27, 1910 – January 10, 1970), was a second generation American modernist poet who was a link between earlier figures such as Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams and the New American poets, which includes the New York School, the Black Mountain School, the Beat poets, and the San Francisco Renaissance. Consequently, many postmodern groups, such as the poets of the language school, include Olson as a primary and precedent figure.

Born in Worcester, Massachusetts, Olson spent summers in Gloucester, Massachusetts, which was to become the focus of his writing. He studied literature and American studies, gaining a B.A and M.A at Wesleyan University. For two years Olson taught English at Clark University then entered Harvard University in 1936 where he finished his coursework for a Ph.D. in American civilization but failed to complete his degree.

In 1941, Olson moved to New York and became the publicity director for the American Civil Liberties Union. One year later, he moved to Washington, D.C. where he worked in the Foreign Language Division of the Office of War Information, where he spent the rest of the war years, eventually rising to Assistant Chief of the division. In 1944, Olson went to work for the Foreign Languages Division of the Democratic National Committee. Olson left politics and dedicated himself to writing, moving to Key West, Florida, in 1945.  In 1951, Olson became a visiting professor at Black Mountain College in North Carolina.  When Black Mountain College closed in 1956, Olson settled in Gloucester, Massachusetts. He served as a visiting professor at the University at Buffalo (1963-1965) and at the University of Connecticut (1969).

Olson's first book, Call Me Ishmael (1947), a study of Herman Melville's novel Moby Dick, was a continuation of his M.A. thesis from Wesleyan University. In Projective Verse (1950), Olson called for a poetic meter based on the poet's breathing and an open construction based on sound and the linking of perceptions rather than syntax and logic. In 1950, Olson began writing The Maximus Poems. An exploration of American history in the broadest sense, Maximus is also an epic of place, Massachusetts and specifically the city of Gloucester where Olson had settled. 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.

Olson's reputation rests in the main on his complex, sometimes difficult poems such as "The Kingfishers," "In Cold Hell, in Thicket," and The 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.