In the following essay, Perloff delineates the defining stylistic features of O'Hara's verse.

In the following essay, Bredbeck considers the role of homosexual semiotics in O'Hara's poetry, utilizing Roland Barthes's theoretical writings.

In the following essay, Goldstein contends that O'Hara effectively addresses the crisis in the movie picture industry in the late 1950s in his poetry.

In the following essay, Sweet investigates the influence of French avant-garde art and the painting of Jackson Pollock on O'Hara's verse and poetic theory.

In the following essay, Crain utilizes the work of child psychiatrist D. W. Winnicott in order to explicate stylistic aspects of O'Hara's poetry as well as his poetic theory of Personism.

In the following essay, Lowney explores O'Hara's utilization of parody, appropriation, and allusion in his poetry and addresses his treatment of the “issue of cultural memory in postwar America.”

[It is] my growing conviction that O'Hara is one of the central poets of the postwar period, and that his influence will continue to grow in the years to come. He is also an important art critic, his improvisatory but incisive essays and reviews recalling those of an earlier poet-art critic whom he loved—Apollinaire. And his collaborations with painters, composers, playwrights, and film-makers have given us some of the most delightful mixed-media works of the fifties and sixties. (p. xii) The ...

In the following review, Meyer surveys the strengths and weakness of O'Hara's verse and links his work with the poetry of Guillaume Apollinaire.

In the following essay, Epstein asserts that “Choses Passagès” is a compelling poem that encourages further study of O’Hara’s friendship with poet John Ashbery.

In the following essay, Stein explores O’Hara’s break from literary tradition and places him in the context of the 1950s.

In the following essay, Feldman examines stylistic aspects of O'Hara's poetry.

In the following essay, Molesworth considers O'Hara's place within the context of modern poetry.

In the following essay, originally published in 1978, Kikel discusses O'Hara as a gay poet.

In the following essay, Vendler provides a thematic and stylistic analysis of O'Hara's poetry.

In the following essay, Bowers emphasizes the importance of New York City in O'Hara's poetry, yet contends that his association with the city has ultimately devalued his work.

In the following essay, Blasing considers O'Hara's use of language in “Biotherm.”

In the following essay, Eberly finds parallels between the poetry of Walt Whitman and Frank O'Hara.

In the following essay, originally published in 1988, Elledge investigates the influence of the cinema on O'Hara's poetry.

It is in the poetry of New York poets like O'Hara and Ashbery that the painterly esthetic of Abstract Expressionism manifests itself in literary art, though Olson's criticism provides for us its literary rationale. (p. 440) O'Hara's connection with the New York art scene dates from about 1950, when he first worked at the Museum of Modern Art and became acquainted with many of the most innovative painters in the New York area at the time. But I am concerned here less with the biog...

Some poets should be allowed to wear their talents lightly. Frank O'Hara … has been badly overdone by his friends and devotees, with their disfiguring puffs and silly elegies…. Devotion often makes a dull business of criticism. But O'Hara is still bobbing. His gifts were for buoyancy, spontaneity and fun. Though he tried to write de profundis, his best poems stay closer to the surface and take their joy and verve from the gregarious life he led. He was, like Pound but in a smalle...

1956–57 were good years for literary revolution. That is when Meditations in an Emergency and Howl appeared on opposite coasts, two of the most important first books of poetry to be published in America since the war. O'Hara like a violin, Ginsberg like a waterfall, let loose the flood of deep associations. They created a torrential rhetoric that literally washed away the poetry of the "silent generation." Certain texts in Meditations in an Emergency are clearly imitations of the...

O'Hara places himself most succinctly in his most famous essay, "Personism: A Manifesto," perhaps the closest thing to a definitive statement of the poetics of the New York School, when he worries if he isn't "sounding like the poor wealthy man's Allen Ginsberg …"…. And yet, in his own way, Frank O'Hara was no less intent upon the liberation of American poetry from the clutches of the New Criticism of the forties and fifties, which, as he...