Charles Olson

Charles Olson (1910 to 1970) was an American poet of the second generation of modernists, a link between earlier modernists such as Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams and the third generation New American poets, a group that includes the New York School, the Black Mountain School and some of the poets associated with the Beat Generation. He grew up in Worcester, Massachusetts, and made nearby Gloucester his adopted home and the focus of his writing. His study of Herman Melville led to the book Call Me Ishmael in 1947, and in 1950 he began The Maximus Poems, an epic of place set in Gloucester. He taught and later led Black Mountain College in North Carolina, and is generally considered a key figure in the shift of American poetry from modernism toward postmodernism. He described himself as an archeologist of morning.