SOURCE: A review of Frank O'Hara: Poet among Painters, in American Literature, Vol. 50, No. 1, March, 1978, pp. 134–35.

In the following review, Meek gives a positive assessment of Frank O'Hara: Poet among Painters.

Marjorie Perloff's intention in this first book-length study of Frank O'Hara's poetry [Frank O'Hara] is to shift attention from the celebrity—curator at the Museum of Modern Art and friend and champion of many contemporary artists—to a serious consideration of his poetry, often dismissed as the merely charming trivia of a spare-time poet who wrote hastily and largely without revision on his lunch break or at parties. It is Perloff's conclusion that, to the contrary, O'Hara ranks as “one of the central poets of the postwar period.”

Self-deprecatory, undeniably charming, and impeccable in their comedic timing, O'Hara's poems were nonetheless a serious matter for him. Always behind his words lies the anxiety as of someone afraid...