Charles Olson (27 December 1910 – 10 January 1970) was a second generation modernist American poet[1] who was a link between earlier modernist figures such as Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams and the third generation modernist New American poets. The latter includes the New York School, the Black Mountain School, and some of the artists and poets associated with the Beat generation and the San Francisco Renaissance.[1]
Today, Olson remains a central figure of the Black Mountain Poetry school and is generally considered a key figure in moving American poetry from modernism to postmodernism.[2] In these endeavors, Olson described himself not so much as a poet or a historian but as "an archeologist of morning."[3] [n 1]
