The Origin of Frank O'Hara's Urban Poetics

Abstract

The New York School poetry, in particular, brought about tremendous changes in American urban poetry and culture with its revolutionary poetic experiment and innovations. Its representative poet, Frank O’Hara, evinced an inventive and diverse cultural trend, thus facilitating, more directly, a dialogue between city and poetics, and revealing the objective existence of the modern metropolitan attributes and the original humanity and spirituality of the “human beings” living in modern cities. O’Hara’s poetic writings carried more information about urban culture. By uncovering his poetic material and thrashing out his urban poetics in the “the field of integration” between culture and literature, he managed to not only reconsider issues like individuality and unitarity regarding the “self-shaping” of modern human nature but also endowed the metropolitan setting of the text with new connotations in the collision between city and poetics. Therefore, this book attempts to explore the specific texts in specific time and space, with a focus on the influence of the urban environment and urban cultural space upon O’Hara’s poetics, so as to seek a breakthrough on the study of the relevance between the concept of poetics and cultural thoughts beyond literature.