Charles Olson

Charles Olson was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1910, the son of a mail carrier of Swedish origin, and spent his summers in Gloucester. He studied at Wesleyan and Harvard, worked for the wartime administration and then for the Democratic Party, and gave up a political career in 1945. His 1950 essay on projective verse bases the form of the poem on the breath of the one who writes it rather than on metre. He taught at Black Mountain from 1951 and was its last rector, from 1953 until its closure in 1956. He died in New York in 1970.

In the catalogue 1

• PoetryThe Maximus PoemsCharles Olson · 1960Literature