Description
Book SynopsisCharles Olson was quite possibly the greatest, and without question the most influential, of the New American Poets published by Grove Press in the mid-twentieth century.
Synthesizing the experimental avant-garde of Black Mountain College with the uncompromising existentialism of the Beat generation, the new structuralism of the San Francisco Renaissance and heralding the postmodern deconstructionism of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, his spirit, mind and intellect are ubiquitous in late-twentieth-century poetry around the world. His archaeology of language unearthed classical sources and aboriginal, principally Mayan, cultures within the history of European colonialism and resulted in an absolute insistence that the public value of the human imagination is inseparable from the particulars of both the time and place of its origins and composition.
His reputation tarnished and his poetry misread 20 years after his death in Tom Clark's carelessly biased 1991 biography, Cha
