George F. Butterick was an authority on the poet Charles Olson,
edited Olson’s The Maximus Poem and at the time of his death was
working on a biography of the poet. He received the American Book
Award for his Collected Poems of Charles Olson, published in 1987.
He was a a lecturer in English and curator of the Literary Archives
at the University of Connecticut.
Charles Olson was one of the most innovative poets of the 20th
century. As a teacher at the Black Mountain College, he was one of
the three most influential members of the Black Mountain movement,
along with Robert Duncan and Robert Creeley. "Creeley and I have
since engaged in perhaps the most important correspondence of my
life,” Olson told a friend in 1950. Creeley, in his turn, found
Olson's letters "of such energy and calculation that they
constituted a practical 'college' of stimulus and information.”
Robert Creeley was a major American poet, essayist, and editor. He
first met Charles Olson at Black Mountain College where, Creeley
joked, Olson was referred to as "Maximus" and he was called
"Minimus" due to their teacher-apprentice relationship. A close
friendship followed, documented in the ten-volume collected
correspondence. Creely wrote, "The letters...were really my
education just because their range and articulation took me into
terms of writing and many other areas indeed where I otherwise
might never have entered."
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