When the Musée National d'Art Moderne opened in “The Gas Factory” or “The Refinery,” the new Centre National d'Art et de Culture Georges Pompidou in Paris was the ideal structure for a retrospective on the Dadaist Marcel Duchamp. Far less suitable for the spirit of Frank O'Hara is Marjorie Perloff's Frank O'Hara: Poet among Painters. The book is neither a biography of the poet, for “versions of specific incidents [do] not always coincide,” nor an analysis of the myths surrounding the poet. “Interest has centered on the man rather than on the work,” and Perloff's intent “is to right the balance” by emphasizing the poetry and O'Hara's importance as “one of the central poets of the postwar period.” Yet, it is precisely in the instruments that she chooses to accomplish her aim that distortions occur and those readers who saw O'Hara as the liberator of art from institutions now see him “institutionalized” and co-opted by “the great burdens of the past” that he was always too smart in life to be too drawn to. Readers are shown time and again the “influences” on his work, the seriousness with which he studied verse forms, including the ode, and the traditional nature of his syntactical experiments. Indeed, except for quotations, the strongest parts of Perloff's argument are her descriptive analyses of O'Hara's techniques and genres in Chapter Four, and one suspects that this is so because Perloff feels most at home discussing grammar and indulging in the comparative method. Her attempt at historical reconstruction in the book's opening chapter is, in contrast, a tangle of mis- and non-information: William Carlos Williams' attacks on T. S. Eliot began with his “Prologue to Kora in Hell” (1919) and not with the appearance of The Waste Land; Salmagundi Nos. 22–23 adds more than the names of Adrienne Rich, A. R. Ammons, and John Ashbery to those of M. L. Rosenthal's The Modern Poets (1967); and the “myth” of a “controversy of poets,” while it allows the deployment of the comparative method, does not explain the real nature of the division.

The Fifties represented a time when, on the one hand, technology was working to expand the ranges of the individual with affluence and advances in travel and communications and, on the other, education was working to restrict the individual to “the great books,” “the great tradition,” and a role of custodian to the past. The directions were brought into accord by the work of academics either through ambiguity, irony, accommodation, Eliot's “mythic method,” or with the discordia concors of the new metaphysicals. On all sides, universities advanced models of conformity and “bad faith,” at the same time that, by leaving the university, people like O'Hara were finding new vistas available. For academics, art was “a criticism of life” and centered in “high seriousness” and a morality attached to character. For non-academics, the very “pseudo-statement” nature of art could allow valuable free play. Robert Lowell's “argument with action painters” over his wanting “to return to a sort of Tolstoyan fulness of representation, and their technical freedom [that] came from doing the opposite” typifies the difference. Lowell's “Tolstoyan fulness” relies upon views like W. H. Auden's on Christian character as the history of the effects of choice on possibility. For O'Hara, something else was at work. Art permitted a playing at roles—much as dancers, actors, and singers perform—which in passing might alter personality and which in the end results in a “characteristic style” rather than character. Thus, O'Hara can advocate “‘a living situation,’ whose ‘free-wheeling accuracy’ ‘keeps you fresh looking’” and suggest to those who “would like to see art dead” a session at “the Cloisters reading Latin.” Although the NDEA and the movement of creative writers into the universities and the universities' greater involvements with society and social issues in the late Sixties did much to bring the two sides together, the basic issues have remained unresolved.

Frank O'Hara: Poet Among Painters does little to alter the backward look of the university or its emphasis on character. Moreover, if the book does not appreciate sufficiently “characteristic style,” it does offer a fine sense of the poet's early development at Harvard and the University of Michigan and excellent insights into period and individual poems. Perloff is a skilled explicator, as her analyses of “Why I Am Not a Painter” and “Radio” demonstrate. She is also skilled at relating biography to a poem—a necessity, for if no other reason than O'Hara's “personism” gets elements of him and his surroundings into a work. In lieu of a correlation of life style and art, it is important to have such elements shown. Perloff also suspends “moral judgment” regarding O'Hara's personal life, though her rescuing of him from charges of “trivia” into “major” significance suggests that she has not suspended all moral judgments. Indeed, there is an attempt throughout to “redeem” the life in terms of the poetry, to underpin instead of destroy by her analyses the myth of the artist's being “a work of art.” The book does convey, in addition, much of the excitement that Perloff feels at a poetry which looks “like a delightful game” but which also has “an uncanny way” of containing “the perishable fragrance of tradition,” and her genuine appreciation for an expanding rather than narrowing art. Readers may wish at times that her emphasis on what prevents a poem's closure might be better balanced with what opens up a poem, but the reader has no doubt of the appropriateness of the book as an introduction for those who find themselves foundering amid O'Hara's surprising metaphors, images, and logical lapses and wish to go beyond the poems to traditions and facts about the individual who composed them.