Mourning Lycidas in New York: Frank O’Hara’s James Dean elegies as a poetic coming-of-age narrative

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper examines Frank O’Hara’s two elegiac poems written on the occasion of James Dean’s death in 1955 and investigates their deep-seated yet intriguingly ambivalent relationship with the tradition of pastoral elegy. O’Hara’s poetry is characteristically marked by immediacy, spontaneity, and intimacy. When confronted by the death of his cultural alter ego, however, O’Hara almost self-consciously taps into the cliché-laden, pity-driven tradition of pastoral elegy both to enact a ritual of mourning for the dead and to address his sense of loss and grief. This paper discusses how O’Hara utilizes the rich thematic and rhetorical conventions of the pastoral elegiac tradition without diminishing the authenticity of poetic mourning. Concurrently, this paper further delves into how O’Hara uses a distinctively self-referential quality coded in the genre of elegy as a vehicle for affirming his vocational identity and establishing poetic authority. I will thus argue that James Dean elegies not only commemorate the truncated life of a rebellious young actor but also depict O’Hara’s own poetic rite of passage.