Charles Olson

Abstract

Charles Olson (b. 1910–d. 1970) was born to working-class parents in Worcester, Massachusetts. From 1915 the family spent summers at a rented cottage in Gloucester, Massachusetts, a small city that would become central to Olson’s later life and work. At Wesleyan University, Olson earned his BA in 1932 and his MA, with a thesis on Melville, in 1933. Between 1936 and 1939 Olson completed the coursework for a PhD in Harvard’s new program in American civilization, but not the dissertation. In 1938 Olson published his first important essay, “Lear and Moby Dick,” based on his discovery of Melville’s annotated copies of Shakespeare. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1939 for a book on Melville, but his interests shifted toward politics, and between 1941 and 1945 he worked for the American Civil Liberties Union, the Common Council for American Unity, the Foreign Language Division of the Office of War Information, and the Democratic National Committee. Disenchanted with politics, Olson turned back to literature and in 1947, Call Me Ishmael, his study of Moby-Dick, was published, followed by three of his best-known pieces: the poem “The Kingfishers” (1950) and the essays “Projective Verse” (1950) and “Human Universe” (1951). Olson taught at Black Mountain College in North Carolina between 1948 and the College’s closing in 1956, serving as rector from 1954 to 1956. This highly productive period of his life included the beginning of his epic The Maximus Poems, parts of which began to appear in 1953, as well as his five-month trip in 1951 to Lerma, on Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula, where he wrote and conducted research on Mayan ruins and hieroglyphs. Olson gained wider recognition when he appeared as the opening author in Don Allen’s seminal anthology The New American Poetry: 1945–1960 (New York: Grove Press, 1960). Allen’s anthology placed Olson among the leaders of the Pound-Williams tradition in American poetry, which runs outside the academic and publishing mainstream. Olson’s poetics have influenced such poets as Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov, Susan Howe, Rosmarie Waldrop, Amiri Baraka, and Ed Dorn, and he is acknowledged as a central figure in postmodern American poetics. He died of cancer of the liver in New York on 10 January 1970.