I remember the pleasure of my first reading of Frank O'Hara's Lunch Poems when it came out in 1964 in a City Lights edition uniform (except that it was blue and red, not black and white) with Ginsberg's Howl, Kaddish and Reality Sandwiches. Two years later O'Hara was dead, killed by a dune buggy at an all-night party on Fire Island. There was something Keatsian about his poetry, its vividness and particularity, and its spontaneity, though there might be difficulties for a critic who wanted to argue, as Matthew Arnold did when he tried to rescue Keats from the aesthetes, that 'there was flint and iron in him.'

LRB 23 April 1992 | PDF Download