Olson, Charles John (1910–1970)

US poet and theoretician. He was a leader of the Black Mountain school of experimental poets and originator of the theory of ‘composition by field’. His Maximus Poems, published in full in 1983, an open-ended, erudite, and encyclopedic fusion of autobiography and history set in Gloucester, Massachusetts, were a striking attempt to extend the American epic poem beyond Ezra Pound's Cantos or William Carlos Williams' Patterson.

Set out in his influential essay on ‘Projective Verse’ 1950, Olson's theory, which is the poetic equivalent of abstract expressionist and abstract painting, demanded that the measure be based on breath rather than metre. It also demanded that reality be re-enacted rather than described, so that the poet draws associations from the moment of composition, and the reader relives the process of its creation. As well as works of linguistic scholarship and archaeology, Olson published an acclaimed study of Melville, Call Me Ishmael 1947.