Charles Olson was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1910. His father was a mail carrier, and the family spent summers in Gloucester, the old fishing port on Cape Ann, which would become the center of Olson’s life and work. He was a giant of a man, well over six and a half feet tall, with a voice and an appetite for ideas to match.

He studied at Wesleyan University and then at Harvard, where he became obsessed with Herman Melville. He tracked down Melville’s own library, read the books Melville had read, and in 1947 published Call Me Ishmael, a short, strange, brilliant study of how Moby-Dick came to be. It begins: “I take SPACE to be the central fact to man born in America.”

During the Second World War he worked in Washington, in government and for the Democratic Party, and seemed headed for a career in politics. He walked away from it to write poems.

In 1950 he published an essay called “Projective Verse,” which argued that a poem should be shaped by the poet’s breath and laid out across the page as a field of energy, not poured into old forms. Many younger poets read it as a manifesto. In 1951 he went to teach at Black Mountain College, the experimental school in the mountains of North Carolina, and he soon became its rector, leading it through its last years. Among the poets who taught or studied there were Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Ed Dorn, John Wieners and Jonathan Williams. Together they became known as the Black Mountain poets.

After the college closed, Olson went back to Gloucester, and to the great work of his life, The Maximus Poems, a vast sequence of letters and poems about the town, its history and its people, spoken by a figure named Maximus. He worked on it until his death, in New York, in 1970. The finished book runs to more than six hundred pages, and it is one of the great American attempts to hold a whole place in a poem.