Abstract

“The poem is at last between two persons instead of two pages”, Frank O’Hara wrote in his 1959 poetry manifesto. Personism, the term he used to designate his vision on poetry, referred to the personal in a way that was not very different in essence from Eliot’s repudiation of it, but which can be seen as a counter reaction to the Confessional school that was emerging at about the same time. While the latter brought into the poem the mental disorders, sufferings and psychological peculiarities of its poets, the New York school preferred to mould the urban sensitivity of its writers into purely artistic processes based on surrealist and abstract expressionist principles. This paper aims to explore the ways in which some of the New York school poems unfold processes through which spontaneity, automatism and irony help create the “instant mix” (John Ashbery) of perception defined by a polyphonic, but coherent vision.