SOURCE: Perloff, Marjorie. “In Favor of One's Time (1954-61).” In Frank O'Hara: Poet Among Painters, pp. 113-63. New York: George Braziller, 1977.

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

—and it was given to me as the soul is given the hands to hold the ribbons of life! as miles streak by beneath the moon's sharp hooves and I have mastered the speed and strength which is the armor of the world. 

(“There I Could Never Be A Boy,” CP, [The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara] 216)

In 1954, Frank O'Hara was twenty-eight. Within the seven “green and turbulent” years that followed, he produced his finest poems and collaborations as well as his best art criticism. It was, both personally and artistically, the golden period of his life. During the summer of 1955, for example, he wrote to Fairfield Porter that he had written a...