Ronald Wise's Reviews > Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara

As with all collections of poetry (and especially ones of this size), I began reading this book with trepidation – determined to go cover to cover while fearing a tedious struggle to find meaning in cryptic lines full of mythical or classical literary references. After struggling to find significance in some his earliest poems, I soon found myself moving eagerly from one to the next – at first a line or brief passage on occasion, and then entire poems that brought back thoughts, emotions, and experiences of my own that had been long forgotten.

O’Hara’s and my lifetimes barely overlap on the historical timeline, but we share the almost universal personal timeline of men who must come to terms with their homosexuality and find a way to long-term stability and happiness. Much of his poetry is a record of his development in this regard, some of it surprisingly blunt, but most with some degree of discretion or allegory. There were frequent reminders that this collection contains not only poems written for publication, but also those written to and for his intimates.

More historically significant, however, is that O’Hara’s work is a record of one man’s thoughts, emotions, and intimate interactions as a participant in the New York School of poets and artists, and its cross-pollination with the Beat Generation and Hollywood. Cultural references to the people and works of the not-too-distant past also provide clues to what motivated this new school of creativity.

The end of his poetry came as a surprise in this book, as did his death in July 1966 after being hit by a dune-buggy on the beach on Fire Island. But flipping a couple of pages I found a collection of his essays. Among them was one titled “About Zhivago and His Poems”, which I found to be the most captivating item in this collection – I savored every sentence. It brought back vividly some of the greatest passages in Doctor Zhivago, but more powerfully the cultural significance of the poet and poetry. O’Hara focuses on Russian poets Boris Pasternak, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Sergei Esinin [Yesenin], and Yuri Zhivago (the fictional character O’Hara considered distinguishable from its creator). O’Hara’s observations of the effects of the Russian Revolution and the Soviet state on these men’s lives and works provides for an extremely powerful example of the role poetry plays in society and for the poet himself. (I would recommend consulting the Wikipedia articles on Mayakovsky and Esinin to enhance the impact of this essay.)