During the early nineteen hundreds painters began to break away form traditional subjects and ideas associated with painting in order to refresh old conventions. Some artists claimed that painting was simply a matter of paint upon canvas and not a mirror to nature or a window on the world. They began to explore new ways to describe the world with the intent to shock viewers out of their preconceptions. This new breed of painter, the …showed first 75 words of 2807 total…

…showed last 75 words of 2807 total…in this piece that this potential is awe striking or in O'Hara's piece "too much" (line 16). The reader might get the impression that abstract art and expression could go too far and in this manner these poems recognize the likelihood for this occurrence. Williams' and O'Hara's poems do make a valuable comment on the modernist technique while showing that it can be applied to poetry without being too abstract and loosing readers in the process.