Charles Olson’s Aesthetics and Education at Black Mountain College

Charles Olson (1910–1970) joined the faculty of a small, experimental college in Asheville, North Carolina, called Black Mountain College (1933–1957). The college was founded by John Rice while the United States was suffering the Great Depression, the Second World War was underway in the Pacific, and the German Reich had risen to power. This college served as a centre for radically unconventional art and education. There were no grades, no degrees, and no hierarchy or discrimination. Olson contributed his original pedagogical poetics and aesthetics to Black Mountain College. The poet situated himself outside the Western thought tradition, instead drawing upon Mesopotamia to inform his postmodern posture. This paper regards Olson’s aesthetics, poetics and pedagogy as the background for Black Mountain College and late twentieth-century art. Additionally, the paper demonstrates how this extraordinary liberal college continues to present a vibrant historical source of inspiration in the early twenty-first century.