SOURCE: Sweet, David L. “Parodic Nostalgia for Aesthetic Machismo: Frank O'Hara and Jackson Pollock.” Journal of Modern Literature 23, nos. 3-4 (summer 2000): 375-91.

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 his apologetic letter of rejection to Frank O'Hara for the 1955 Yale Younger Poets prize (awarded to John Ashbery), W. H. Auden wrote: “I think you (and John, too, for that matter) must watch what is always the great danger with any ‘surrealistic’ style, namely of confusing authentic non-logical relations which arouse wonder with accidental ones which arouse mere surprise and in the end fatigue.”¹ In a letter to Kenneth Koch, O'Hara responded to Auden's comment, saying: “I don't care what Wystan says, I'd rather be dead than not have France around me like a rhinestone dog-collar.”² In this way he confirms...