ART AND HOMOSEXUALITY IN FRANK O'HARA'S POETRY

With relatively few exceptions, and until fairly recently, Frank O'Hara, the poet, has been less seriously regarded than has Frank O'Hara, the highly visible member of a coterie of New York artists and poets in the 1950s and mid-1960s. Critics have variously attempted to classify O'Hara as simply a "light" poet, or as a late modernist, or as a revolutionary in reaction against high modernism. Many of these latter efforts have been made by other poets, and by critics who are admirers of O'Hara's work, in a certainly justifiable attempt to "legitimize" O'Hara's canon so that it might be permitted a respected place in the mainstream of American poetry. That the main body of criticism of O'Hara's work ignores, and so represses, the homosexual content of the poetry, is of the first importance in this discussion of O'Hara's poetry.;The homosexual content of O'Hara's poetry is, in essence, one of the two converging lines of O'Hara's poetic perspective to be examined in this dissertation. The other is his poetic use of the language of the visual arts. The gist of this essay, then, is that there can be a critical reading of O'Hara's poetry of New York that supplements the one that "legitimized" his poetry; a reading that emphasizes the frequent fusion of the aesthetics of poetry with the aesthetics of the visual arts, and that particularly emphasizes a private and largely over-looked aspect of O'Hara's work: the aspect of the urban homosexual, or gay, experience.;Far from being merely chatty, "chic," gossipy, trivial, sophisticatedly obscure, or being only a reflection of Abstract Expressionist aesthetics in poetry, much of O'Hara's canon is a concrete manifestation of his conscious, deliberate, intense, and continuous creative involvement with even the most minute details of his daily experience in the worlds of art and homosexuality, augmented by his poetic stance oblique from the periphery.