 
Friendship and Postwar American Poetry
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Although it has long been commonplace to imagine the archetypal American poet singing a solitary “Song of Myself,” much of the most enduring American poetry has actually been preoccupied with the drama of friendship. In this lucid and absorbing study, Andrew Epstein argues that an obsession with both the pleasures and problems of friendship erupts in the “New American Poetry” that emerges after the Second World War. By focusing on some of the most significant postmodernist American poets – the “New York School” poets John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, and their close contemporary Amiri
Baraka – Beautiful Enemies reveals a fundamental paradox at the heart of postwar American poetry and culture: the avant-garde’s commitment to individualism and nonconformity runs directly counter to its own valorization of community and collaboration. In fact, Epstein demonstrates that the clash between friendship and nonconformity complicates the legendary alliances forged by postwar poets, becomes a predominant theme in the poetry they created, and leaves contemporary writers with a complicated legacy to negotiate. Rather than simply celebrating friendship and poetic community as nurturing and inspiring, these poets represent friendship as a kind of exhilirating, maddening contradiction, a site of attraction and repulsion, affinity and rivalry.
Challenging both the reductive critiques of American individualism and the idealized, heavily biographical celebrations of literary camaraderie one finds in much critical discussion, this book provides a new interpretation of the peculiar dynamics of American avant-garde poetic communities and the role of the individual within them. By situating his extensive and revealing readings of these highly influential poets against the backdrop of Cold War cultural politics and within the context of American pragmatist thought, Epstein uncovers the collision between radical self-reliance and the siren call of the interpersonal at the core of postwar American poetry.
“Beautiful Enemies charts the fascinating tensions between individual and community in the New York poetry world of mid-century. For post-World War II poets, friendship was at once the engine that made poetry come alive, and yet it could also be confining and oppressive – the source of competition as well as nourishment. Andrew Epstein examines the role community played in the forging of New York poetics – a poetics that cannot be dissociated from its relation to Cold War politics. His is a fascinating, beautifully documented investigation, both of individual poems and of the interlocking friendships that animated their production.”
--Marjorie
Perloff, author of Frank O’Hara, Poet Among
Painters
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“In Beautiful Enemies, Andrew Epstein offers exemplary Emersonian readings of the intricate web connecting individual talent and collective investment in the poetry and poetics of John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, and Amiri Baraka. Averting the Cold War myth of the individual voice in the wilderness of conformity, Epstein gives us voices in conversation and conflict, suggesting that resistance to agreement is at the heart of a pragmatist understanding of literary community.”
--Charles
Bernstein, Donald T. Regan Professor
of English, University of Pennsylvania
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ABOUT THE POETS
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