Book overview
Winner of the National Book Award for Poetry
"During the halcyon days of the Abstract Expressionist and Imaginative Realism movements, Frank O'Hara was the laureate of the New York art scene."--New York Times
The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara, edited by Donald Allen and with an introduction by John Ashbery, captures the full range of one of postwar America's most original and influential poets. Born in 1926, O'Hara became the quintessential voice of mid-century Manhattan, evolving a witty, mercurial, and glamorous urban poetry that captured the artistic scene of 1950s to '60s New York. Including poems from his dazzling early experimental verses of the late 1940s to his more reflective work before his untimely death at the age of forty, the collection reveals O'Hara's inventive voice, blending French post-symbolism, surrealist, and Dada techniques and the everyday American experience into a uniquely postmodern poetics. First published posthumously in 1972, this landmark collection affirms Frank O'Hara's central place in American poetry: witty, fantastical, vital.