O'Hara places himself most succinctly in his most famous essay, "Personism: A Manifesto," perhaps the closest thing to a definitive statement of the poetics of the New York School, when he worries if he isn't "sounding like the poor wealthy man's Allen Ginsberg …"…. And yet, in his own way, Frank O'Hara was no less intent upon the liberation of American poetry from the clutches of the New Criticism of the forties and fifties, which, as he elaborates in an interview less than a year before his death, tended to look upon art as the raw material of criticism….

He can talk about Jackson Pollack and Andy Warhol, about Gregory Corso and W. H. Auden. Throughout it all, he seems to be having a good time. More casual in tone than Allen Ginsberg, he is often equally as penetrating.

Aram Saroyan, "Prose of a New York Poet," in The...