The Technique of Poetic Collage in the Selected Poems of New York school poets

Abstract

The word 'collage' simply means pasting unrelated things together to form artistic objects of sorts. It began first to be used by the painters and artists in general to produce a kind of art suitable to the prevalent avant-garde movement in art and literature. T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland and Ezra Pound's The Cantos are two master examples of the use of collage in the early modernist poetry. The purpose of this paper is to examine the use of collage by the poets New York School in selected poems as exemplified in the major poets of the school, namely John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara and Kenneth Koch. The paper argues that the poets of the New York school have been influenced heavily by the prevalent art movements specially the Abstract Expressionism. They imitated the Abstract Expressionists in their rejection of figurative subject matter and their working completely in the abstract. Their resort to such art as collage is to challenge the conventional ideas about art.