This book examines poetic adaptations of painterly techniques in works by writers such as Guillaume Apollinaire, Pierre Reverdy, Andre Breton, Frank O'Hara, and John Ashbery--all chosen for the experimentalism of their poetry as well as for the quality of their critical writings on art. Close attention is paid to essays on painters identified with Cubism, Futurism, and Dada-Surrealism in France and with Abstract Expressionism and New Realism in the United States.

Selected poems are examined in light of the critical essays and are taken either as illustrations of a new plastic poetic...