Beautiful Enemies: Friendship and Postwar American Poetry
The premise is simple-John Ashbery and Frank O'Hara were frenemies, as were O'Hara and LeRoi Jones (now Amiri Baraka)-but Florida State University assistant professor Epstein handles it with such care and intelligence, that his study ends up revealing a great deal about the American midcentury avant-garde. For those in the know, the above two friendships won't be news, but never before have they been presented in such painstaking detail, backed by a wealth of letters and readings of the poets' verse that are patient in the explication, and in their refusal to draw easy conclusions about the nature of the relationships under discussion. Two opening chapters offer an introduction to the avant-garde as it functioned in American culture, and to its Emersonian origins, followed by individual chapters considering each of the three poets (with close references to the other two, and to many other poets and artists), and a final summation of the many paradoxes and contradictions encountered therein. Anyone with an interest in the ways great poetry depends on complex and extraordinary relationships will find this book deeply rewarding.Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.