Charles Olson (27 December 1910 – 10 January 1970), was a second generation American modernist poet who was a crucial link between earlier figures like Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams and the New American poets, a rubric which includes the New York School, the Black Mountain School, the Beat poets, and the San Francisco Renaissance. Consequently, many postmodern groups, such as the poets of the Language School, include Olson as a primary and precedent figure. Across the Atlantic, these various poetic movements have exerted a deep and ongoing influence on an important array of alternative and experimental writers, including Roy Fisher, Geoffrey Hill, JH Prynne and Edwin Morgan, behind whose works lurks Olson's ghost of language-driven inventiveness.

Olson coined the term postmodern in a letter of 1949 to his friend and fellow poet, Robert Creeley. Accretions to the term since Olson coined it are voluminous, but he first used the word in a literal chronological sense, i.e., that he and Creeley and other artists of his time came after the great Modernists such as Pound, Williams, D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Stravinsky, O'Keefe, Frida Kahlo, Kandinsky, Picasso, Marsden Hartley, Chaplin, Keaton, D. W. Griffith, Frank Lloyd Wright, etc. Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.