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Scholars Explore the Charles Olson Archives
Four new books shed light on the poetry and prose, letters and reading of one of the 20th-century's foremost poets
Richard Fyffe
Bibliographer for the Humanities
Charles Olson (1910-1970) was one of the foremost American poets of the generation directly influenced by Ezra Pound, and his extensive archive of manuscripts, notebooks, and correspondence is one of the most frequently consulted collections in the Libraries' Archives & Special Collections Department. The papers are an important primary source not just for the study of Olson's own writing, but also for the artistic, cultural, and intellectual history of mid-20th century America; they attract scholars from across the United States and from as far away as Japan.
Several new or forthcoming publications draw on this rich collection. The University of California Press will publish Olson's Collected Prose, edited by Donald A. Allen. This volume will collect all of Olson's previously published prose work--including his classic book-length study of Herman Melville, Call Me Ishmael--together with an essay never before published on the abstract painter Cy Twombley. The volume will include an introduction by the poet Robert Creeley and interpretive notes.
The University of California Press will also publish Olson's Selected Letters, edited and introduced by Ralph Maud, professor emeritus at Simon Fraser University. Olson's voice in correspondence is particularly engaging as an expression of intellect and personality. Black Sparrow Press is publishing the correspondence of Olson and Robert Creeley, one of the most vital and sustained literary correspondences of the 20th century. The nine volumes published to date cover just two years (1950-1952); a tenth volume, edited by Richard Blevins, is in preparation.
California Press has made a significant commitment to the Olson canon, having published critical editions of Olson's epic poem The Maximus (1983) and the Collected Poems (1987), both edited by the late George Butterick. In 1993, Olson's Selected Poems was published as one of the press's one hundred Centennial anniversary volumes.
Southern Illinois University Press has recently published Charles Olson's Reading: A Biography, by Ralph Maud. Olson's Reading traces the poet's intellectual career through a reconstruction of a lifetime of his reading. A major resource for this work was Olson's extensive library, most of which is part of the Olson Collection in Archives & Special Collections. In his writing, Olson drew heavily on works of history, philosophy, myth, psychology, and other subjects. His personal copies of these books tend to be heavily annotated with comments and the beginnings of his poems. Another work by professor Maud, What Does Not Change, is scheduled for publication by Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. This book is an explication of one of Olson's most important early poems, "The Kingfisher."
Born in Worcester, Massachusetts, Charles Olson summered with his family in the coastal community of Gloucester, whose long maritime heritage became the subject of his epic poem The Maximus. He later lived in Gloucester. Olson was educated at Wesleyan University, where he wrote a master's thesis on Herman Melville; and at Harvard University, where he was a member of the first Ph.D. class in American Studies (his teachers included the historians Perry Miller and Frederick Merk and literary scholar F.O. Matthiessen). Leaving the program before completing his dissertation, Olson spent the war years working for the American Civil Liberties Union and Louis Adamic's Common Council, and then for the Foreign Language Division of the Office of War Information.
In 1948, Olson was invited by the painter Josef Albers to take a part-time appointment as a writing teacher at Black Mountain College, an experimental school for the arts located outside Asheville, North Carolina. The College had been founded in 1933 by a small group of teachers influenced by the philosopher and educational reformer John Dewey. In 1953 Olson became the school's director, and he recruited his friend Robert Creeley to join the writing faculty. During Olson's tenure, Black Mountain students and faculty also included John Cage, Buckminster Fuller, Robert Rauschenberg, and Merce Cunningham. In 1956, tight finances finally caused the school to close. Olson returned to Gloucester, and later taught at the State University of New York at Buffalo. In 1969, he moved to Mansfield, Connecticut, and began teaching in the University of Connecticut English Department; his former student, Charles Boer, was also on the faculty. Olson was stricken with cancer near the end of the semester and he died in January, 1970.
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