The New York School in the 1950s

While we have a now well-developed critical account of the ways in which the New York School poets might be located within art and literary history (as an elaboration of the Stevensian line of Modernist poetry as an autotelic self-reflexive meditation on poetic making; as a poetic response to the challenges of Abstract Expressionism; or as an effort to imagine the fate of the avant-garde in an era in which its accomplishments could be immediately co-opted), a more recent body of work has located the concerns of these poets in relation to broader social forces. In Michael Clune’s work we find a dynamic account of Frank O’Hara’s engagement with the free market; critics following John Shoptaw have read John Ashbery’s work in relation to questions of homosexuality and the closet; Maggie Nelson has revealed the complex gender dynamics of a school too-often thought as exclusively male; and Christopher Nealon has recently located an ambivalent relationship to the geopolitics of the American century within Ashbery’s later work. This chapter extends these contextualizations of the New York School, reading the stylistic particularity of the poets in relation to the culture of the 1950s.