The New York School, the Mainstream, and the Avant-Garde

At times, your disinterestedness may seem insincere, to strangers.

Frank O’Hara, “Lines for the Fortune Cookies”

Frank O’Hara’s “Personal Poem” (1959) has long been a critical fulcrum in studies of his poetry, from Marjorie Perloff’s foundational Frank O’Hara: Poet among Painters (1977) to Oren Izenberg’s Being Numerous (2011). And the discussion inevitably turns to O’Hara’s report of a conversation with Amiri Baraka: “we don’t like Lionel Trilling / we decide, we like Don Allen we don’t like / Henry James so much we like Herman Melville” (Collected Poems 336). The usual way to read these lines is to say that O’Hara documents a divided literary culture. In naming figures known for their associations with the mainstream Partisan Review (Trilling) and the iconoclastic Evergreen Review (Allen), O’Hara—in one resonance of this juxtaposition—seems to announce the New York school’s publishing allegiances.¹ For Michael Clune, one of O’Hara’s most astute readers, the preference is “an obvious and uninteresting corollary” to the “personal and aesthetic positions” that O’Hara takes throughout the poem (55).

True enough, but it is an uninteresting choice only if we take O’Hara at his word. In reality, he did not abide by this preference. O’Hara and several of his fellow New York school poets did publish in Partisan Review, the premier intellectual organ of the anticommunist left, and establishment magazines were as central to the group’s formation as anti-academic publications such as Evergreen. While the iconic City Lights edition of O’Hara’s Lunch Poems (1964) seems to tell us everything we need to know about the group’s publication history, just as important was the New York school’s long engagement with Poetry, America’s most visible and important venue for mid-century mainstream verse. From 1955 to 1957, in fact, Poetry published an astonishing eighteen poems and two reviews by O’Hara. Thus O’Hara, who elsewhere referred to his “literary ‘heroes’ of the Partisan Review” (Collected Poems 512), happily published in the kind of high-prestige literary magazines that he claimed to despise.

If the contrast between O’Hara’s shoptalk and his publishing practices reveals a contradiction, the distinction he posited between Trilling and Allen was prescient. Less than a year later, Donald Allen would publish his groundbreaking anthology The New American Poetry, 1945–1960 (1960), and from then on, thumbnail histories of post–1945 American poetry would be expressed in adversarial terms. “On one side,” Walter Kalaidjian tells us, “stands the New Critical verse tradition; on the other are massed its emergent adversaries: ‘projectivist,’ confessional, neosurrealist, ‘deep image,’ regional, feminist, Afro-American, and other local schools and movements” (3). Critics frequently use two anthologies as a shorthand for this supposedly epic battle: Donald Hall, Robert Pack, and Louis Simpson’s New Poets of England and America (1957), which featured poets now associated with a reactionary traditionalism transmitted through the New Criticism; and Allen’s The New American Poetry, which announced its rejection of “all those qualities typical of academic verse” (xi). But this crude bifurcation ultimately obstructs our view of the vast and variegated landscape of postwar poetry. Luckily, since Kalaidjian’s pathbreaking Languages of Liberation (1989), more than twenty-five years of scholarly books have mapped the institutional and social conditions of postwar American poetry—works such as Alan Golding’s From Outlaw to Classic (1995), Jed Rasula’s American Poetry Wax Museum (1996), Christopher Beach’s Poetic Culture (1999), Libbie Rifkin’s Career Moves (2000), and Andrew Epstein’s Beautiful Enemies (2006)—thus complicating the troublesome New Poets/New American divide. Against the backdrop of the New Critics’ rise to institutional power, these works have uncovered many instances of conflict within this field—acts of exclusion by the establishment, deep disagreements within each “camp,” and attempts by the outsider poets to legitimate their work.²

Joining this wide range of studies that have considered postwar American poetry’s relationship with cultural institutions, this essay chronicles a key episode in the formation of the...