SOURCE: Vendler, Helen. “The Virtues of the Alterable.” Parnassus: Poetry in Review 1, no. 12 (fall-winter 1972): 5-20.

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

Now that Knopf has given us O'Hara's Collected Poems they had better rapidly produce a Selected Poems, a book that wouldn't drown O'Hara in his own fluency. For the record, we need this new collection; for the sake of fame and poetry, we need a massively reduced version, showing O'Hara at his best. His charms are inseparable from his overproduction—the offhand remark, the fleeting notation of a landscape, the Christmas or birthday verse, the impromptu souvenir of a party—these are his common forms, as though he roamed through life snapping Polaroid pictures, pulling them out of his camera and throwing them in a desk drawer sixty seconds later. And here they are—some overexposed, some under-developed, some...