Koch writes of Schwartz: "I'd never seen anybody who was in all those New Directions anthologies .... he gave me the image of a real poet." Another important step in Koch's development as a poet occurred when he spent the 1950-1951 academic year in France on a Fulbright grant. "My first year in France had a huge effect on my poetry," Koch wrote in 1960; "since I didn't read French very well but managed to be very excited by French poetry anyway, I began to try to get the same incomprehensible excitement into my own work. It wasn't a deliberate attempt to be obscure (I hate obscurity) but to recreate an excitement I had felt. My poetry was very much like a foreign language for about a year and a half after that."
Perhaps the major influences on Koch's burgeoning career in the 1950s were his friendships with John Ashbery (whom he had met at Harvard) and Frank O'Hara and his involvement with the New York avant-garde poetry-art-music scene during that decade.
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