O'Hara was a curator at MoMA who wrote poems on his lunch break, on the subway, between phone calls ("I am not a professor of anything"), and whose work captures the texture of New York life in the 1950s and 60s with an immediacy no one else has matched. His "Personism" manifesto (the poem should be addressed to a specific person "over the telephone") is the best short anti-manifesto in American poetry. He died at 40, hit by a dune buggy on Fire Island.

The case for it, the case against, and the rest of the canon open with Pro.