This chapter focuses on the New York School of poetry and traces its origins, its history, and its legacy. It discusses the importance of the avant-garde tradition and visual art, especially Abstract Expressionism, to the poets of the New York School, and examines the most important formal innovations and thematic concerns of the poets at its heart. The chapter focuses on the work of Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler, and Barbara Guest, along with poets of the movement’s second generation, including Ted Berrigan, Alice Notley, and Bernadette Mayer.

Epstein’s chapter challenges the tendency to overlook the significance of Wallace Stevens—and his characteristic idiom, poetics, and philosophical concerns—to the postwar avant-garde movement known as the New York School of poets. This neglect of Stevens as an important precursor causes problems in both directions: it unnecessarily limits our sense of New York School poetry, which can too easily be reduced to a chatty, pop-culture-infused poetry of urban daily life, while simultaneously reinforcing the distorted image of Stevens as a stuffy, backward-looking aesthete, devoted solely to abstraction and imagination. Epstein suggests that, for all their differences, Stevens and the New York School poets share a great deal: an obsession with painting and a passion for all things French; a delight in wordplay and the sensuous surfaces of language; an anti-foundational skepticism toward fixity in self, language, or idea; and, perhaps most of all, an embrace of the imagination and deep attraction to the surreal combined with a devotion to the ordinary and everyday.