‘A New Mimesis’: approaches to representation in the poetry of the New York School

Although the New York School of Poets opposed reception as a unified artistic movement, study of a selection of their early poetry illustrates that John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara and James Schuyler all shared a concern with developing new techniques of representation.This essay argues that much of their experimentation was motivated by a desire to communicate personal experience in poetry without clarification or analysis, and so to depict the self without elevating the significance of the individual.