Frank O’Hara

Frank O’Hara (1926-1966), American poet and a major figure in the 1950s movement in art and poetry known as the New York School. O'Hara was born in Baltimore, Maryland and grew up in Grafton, Massachusetts. As a youth he studied piano, aspiring to be a composer, and began writing poetry. O’Hara attended Harvard University, where he met the poets John Ashbery and Kenneth Koch; he graduated in 1950. One year later O’Hara moved to New York City and soon occupied a central position in the artistic life there as poet, playwright, art critic, and, eventually, Associate Curator at the Museum of Modern Art. His first book of poems, A City Winter and Other Poems, appeared in 1952, followed by Meditations in an Emergency (1957), Odes, Second Avenue (both 1960), Lunch Poems (1964), and Love Poems (1965). His Art Chronicles: 1954-1966 (1975) were a collection of essays on the leading figures of the abstract expressionist movement. The book reflects his early, keen perception of and personal involvement in the New York art scene during a period when New York became the capital of modernism in the arts.

O'Hara wrote many different kinds of poems, some narrative and others introspective. There is the grand, abstract rhetoric of Odes and the earthier language of the 'I do this I do that' poems. 'Sleeping on the Wing' is both sorrowful and assertive:

O'Hara's influence has been immense, partly due to the great scope of his work revealed in such posthumous volumes as Collected Poems (1972) and Poems Retrieved (1977).