25 Facts About Charles Olson

Charles Olson was a second generation modern American 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.

Charles Olson was born to Karl Joseph and Mary Charles Olson and grew up in Worcester, Massachusetts, where his father worked as a mail carrier.

Charles Olson spent summers in Gloucester, Massachusetts, which was to become his adopted hometown and the focus of his writing.

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

Charles Olson eventually joined the newly-formed doctoral program in American Civilization as one of its first three candidates.

Charles Olson then received the first of two Guggenheim Fellowships for his studies of Melville; a monograph derived from his master's thesis and subsequent research, Call Me Ishmael, was published in 1947.

In 1941, Charles Olson moved to New York City's Greenwich Village and began living with Constance "Connie" Wilcock in a common-law marriage; they had one child, Katherine.

Upset about the increasing censorship of his news releases, Charles Olson went to work for the Democratic National Committee as director of the Foreign Nationalities Division in May 1944.

The death of Roosevelt and concomitant ascendancy of Harry Truman in April 1945 inspired Charles Olson to dedicate himself to a literary career.

From 1946 to 1948, Charles Olson visited Ezra Pound at St Elizabeths Hospital; however, he was repelled by Pound's increasingly fascist tendencies.

In September 1948, Charles Olson became a visiting professor at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, replacing longtime friend Edward Dahlberg for the academic year.

Charles Olson subsequently joined the permanent faculty at the invitation of the student body in 1951 and became Rector shortly thereafter.

Charles Olson's influence has been cited by artists in other media, including Carolee Schneemann and James Tenney.

Charles Olson's ideas came to influence a generation of poets, including writers Duncan, Dorn, Denise Levertov, and Paul Blackburn.

Charles Olson wrote copious personal letters and helped and encouraged many young writers.

When Black Mountain College closed in 1956, Charles Olson oversaw the resolution of the institution's debts over the next five years and settled in Gloucester.

Charles Olson participated in early psilocybin experiments under the aegis of Timothy Leary in 1961 and Henry Murray and served as a distinguished professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo and visiting professor at the University of Connecticut.

From 1965 until his death, Charles Olson received a generous, informal annuity 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.

Charles Olson's death precipitated Olson into an existential mixture of extreme isolation, romantic longing, and frenzied work.

Charles Olson died there in 1970, two weeks past his fifty-ninth birthday, while in the process of completing his epic, The Maximus Poems.

In Projective Verse, Charles 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.

Charles Olson favored metre not based on syllable, stress, foot or line but using only the unit of the breath.

Charles 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.

Charles Olson coined the term postmodern in a letter of August 1951 to Robert Creeley.

In 1950, inspired by the example of Pound's Cantos, Charles Olson began writing The Maximus Poems.