A short life of the author
Charles Olson (27 December 1910 – 10 January 1970) was an American poet, essayist, and literary theorist whose essay “Projective Verse” (1950) and long poem The Maximus Poems (1953–1975) made him the dominant figure of the Black Mountain school of poetry and one of the most influential — and most contested — American poets of the postwar period. He was a physically enormous man (six foot seven) with an equally enormous intellectual appetite, and his ambition was nothing less than to reconceive the poem as a field of energy transferred from the poet to the reader through the kinetics of breath, syllable, and line.
Life and Career
Olson was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, and spent summers in Gloucester, Massachusetts — the fishing port that became the setting for The Maximus Poems and the obsessive centre of his imaginative universe. He attended Wesleyan University and Harvard, where he studied American civilisation and worked on the Melville papers — research that produced Call Me Ishmael (1947), a study of Moby-Dick that is as much manifesto as criticism. The book’s opening — “I take SPACE to be the central fact to man born in America” — announces Olson’s characteristic mode: bold, declarative, impatient with qualification.
During World War II he worked in the Office of War Information and briefly in Democratic Party politics (he was offered a position in the Roosevelt administration). But he abandoned politics for poetry and in 1948 began teaching at Black Mountain College — the experimental school in North Carolina where Josef Albers, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Robert Rauschenberg, and Buckminster Fuller had taught or studied. Olson became rector of the college in 1951 and ran it until its closure in 1956, turning it into the centre of a poetic revolution.
At Black Mountain he gathered a group of poets — Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov, Ed Dorn, Joel Oppenheimer — who became the Black Mountain school, the most important American poetry movement between the Objectivists and the Beats. His essay “Projective Verse” (1950) — published in Poetry New York — was their manifesto.
Projective Verse
“Projective Verse” argues that poetry should be composed by the breath rather than by inherited metrical patterns, that the poem should be a “field of action” rather than a closed form, and that the typewriter — with its precise control of spacing — should be used to score the poem the way a musical composition is scored. The essay’s key dictum — “ONE PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY LEAD TO A FURTHER PERCEPTION” — demands a poetry of continuous, kinetic energy rather than of static arrangement.
The essay’s influence was enormous. William Carlos Williams printed it in his Autobiography and called it “an advance of immeasurable proportions.” Allen Ginsberg absorbed its principles. The Language poets responded to it. Even poets who rejected its premises had to reckon with it.
The Maximus Poems
The Maximus Poems — published in three volumes (1960, 1968, 1975) — is Olson’s major work: an epic poem addressed from “Maximus” (a version of Olson himself, named after the second-century Neoplatonist philosopher Maximus of Tyre) to the city of Gloucester. The poem is modelled partly on Pound’s Cantos and partly on Williams’s Paterson, but its method is distinctively Olson’s: it interweaves colonial history, fishing industry economics, Norse mythology, Herodotus, geology, cartography, and personal observation into a poem that attempts to think through the entire relationship between a human settlement and the land and sea on which it depends.
The poem is difficult, often deliberately obscure, and its later volumes become increasingly fragmentary. It is also — at its best — a work of extraordinary ambition and intermittent brilliance, and its influence on subsequent long poems and documentary poetics has been immense.
Critical Standing
Olson is a pivotal but polarising figure. His admirers (Creeley, Duncan, Dorn, and later poets like Susan Howe and Peter Middleton) regard him as the essential link between Pound/Williams modernism and the postmodern poetics of the 1970s and beyond. His critics find The Maximus Poems self-indulgent, Projective Verse incoherent, and his intellectual method bullying rather than illuminating. Both positions have merit.
Key Works
- Call Me Ishmael (1947)
- “Projective Verse” (1950)
- The Maximus Poems (1960, 1968, 1975)
- Human Universe and Other Essays (1965)
What Is Projective Verse and Why Does It Matter?
Projective verse matters because it proposed that the poem’s form should be determined not by inherited patterns (sonnets, iambic pentameter) but by the poet’s breath, the kinetic energy of perception, and the physical act of composition. The typewriter, Olson argued, gave the poet control over the exact spacing of syllables — making the poem a score for the voice. Whether or not one accepts Olson’s theory (and many poets do not), it opened the door to an enormous range of formally open, process-based poetry that dominated American avant-garde writing for decades.
Collecting Olson
Call Me Ishmael (1947, Reynal & Hitchcock) — his first book — brings $100–$300. The Maximus Poems (1960, Jargon/Corinth) — the first volume — brings $80–$200. Jargon Society editions and small-press publications are the most collectible items. His correspondence with Creeley (published in multiple volumes) is essential for scholars.