Charles Olson

Charles John Olson (27 December 1910 – 10 January 1970) was a second generation modernist American poet who was a link between earlier modernist figures such as Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams and the third generation modernist New American poets. The latter includes the New York School, the Black Mountain School, and some of the artists and poets associated with the Beat Generation and the San Francisco Renaissance.

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. In these endeavors, Olson described himself not so much as a poet or a historian but as "an archeologist of morning."

Life

Olson was born to Karl Joseph and Mary (Hines) Olson and grew up in Worcester, Massachusetts, where his father worked as a mail carrier. He spent summers in Gloucester, 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 with William Butler Yeats) as a prize. He studied English literature at Wesleyan University, where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1932 before earning an M.A. in the discipline (with a thesis on the oeuvre of Herman Melville) in 1933. 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 at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts.

Olson entered Harvard University as a doctoral student in English in 1936.