Just as the reputation of Robert Lowell, long considered one of the foremost American poets of the century, has fallen somewhat, O'Hara's reputation has risen. At first O'Hara wasn't taken all that seriously. As Marjorie Perloff notes in her Frank O 'Ham: Poet Among Painters, O'Hara was first seen as "a coterie figure—adored by his New York School friends and acolytes, especially by the painters whose work he exhibited and wrote about, but otherwise regarded (when regarded at all) as a charming minor poet."

In fact, the first really insightful criticism on O'Hara's work did not appear until 1968, two years after his death, when Paul Carroll's critical survey of some of the younger poets of the day, The Poem in Its Skin, appeared. Carroll writes that, "No one could have guessed ten years ago that the poems of Frank O'Hara would be among the most...