Literary Ethics in Frank O'Hara's Urban Poetics

Abstract

As part of the mainstream of British and American poetry in the twentieth century, the New York School poetry has won the attention and praise of the literary community for its distinctive form of innovation. However, only limited scholarship has addressed its innovation from the perspective of ethical literary criticism. In this sense, ethical literary criticism, a theory that focuses on social morality and ethics, may illustrate at least two points on assessing and appreciating the ontological significance of literary and artistic works: one is exposing the existing ethical–moral order in the current social reality; the other is resolving the spiritual and ecological crisis of the modern world through the reconstruction and guidance of ethics. From the perspective of literary ethics, this chapter will look into the ethical system of O’Hara’s urban poetics.