In Selected Poems, we experience the full range of James Schuyler’s achievement, confirming that he was among the late twentieth century’s truly vital and distinctive poetic voices. One of the most significant writers of the New York School—which unofficially included John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, and Kenneth Koch, among others—Schuyler was strongly influenced by both art and music in his work, often incorporating rapid shifts in sound, shape, and color within his poems that almost gave his work the effect of a collage and engendered comparisons with Whitman and Rimbaud.

James Schuyler (1923–91) received the Pulitzer Prize for poetry for The Morning of the Poem in 1981.