O'Hara, Frank 1926–66, American poet, b. Baltimore, grad. Harvard (B.A., 1950), Univ. of Michigan, Ann Arbor (M.A., 1951). His poetry is spontaneous, vernacular, witty, personal, and very much of its time and place—New York City, 1951–66. Closely associated with many of the painters of his time, O'Hara was a founder of the Poet's Theatre and later the center of the New York school of poets (consisting of himself, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler). His writings include Collected Poems (1971), Early Writing (1977), Poems Retrieved (1977), and Selected Poems (2008).
See biography by B. Gooch (1993); memoir by J. LeSueur (2003); M. Perloff, Frank O'Hara: Poet among Painters (1997); D. Lehman, The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets (1999); G. Ward, Statutes of Liberty: The New York School of Poets (2d ed. 2001).
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