Drawing extensively upon the poet's unpublished manuscripts - poems, journals, essays, and letters - as well as all his published works, Marjorie Perloff presents Frank O'Hara as one of the central poets of the postwar period and an important critic of the visual arts. Perloff traces the poet's development through his early years at Harvard and his interest in French Dadaism and Surrealism to his later poems that fuse literary influence with elements from Abstract Expressionist painting, atonal music, and contemporary film. This edition contains a new introduction addressing O'Hara's homosexuality, his attitudes toward racism, and changes in the poetic climate in recent years.