Frank O'Hara

For the Australian rules footballer, see Frank O'Hara (footballer).
Frank O'Hara
Born(1926-03-27)March 27, 1926
Baltimore, Maryland, U.S.
DiedJuly 25, 1966(1966-07-25) (aged 40)
Mastic Beach, New York, U.S.
Resting placeGreen River Cemetery, Springs, New York, U.S.
OccupationPoet, art curator
Alma materHarvard University (AB)
University of Michigan (MA)
Literary movementThe New York School
Notable worksLunch Poems

Francis Russell "Frank" O'Hara (March 27, 1926 – July 25, 1966) was an American writer, poet, and art critic. A curator at the Museum of Modern Art, O'Hara became prominent in New York City's art world. O'Hara is regarded as a leading figure in the New York School, an informal group of artists, writers, and musicians who drew inspiration from jazz, surrealism, abstract expressionism, action painting, and contemporary avant-garde art movements.

O'Hara's poetry is personal in tone and content, and has been described as sounding "like entries in a diary".[1] Poet and critic Mark Doty has said O'Hara's poetry is "urbane, ironic, sometimes genuinely celebratory and often wildly funny" containing "material and associations alien to academic verse" such as "the camp icons of movie stars of the twenties and thirties, the daily landscape of social activity in Manhattan, jazz music, telephone calls from friends".[2] O'Hara sought to capture in his poetry the immediacy of life, feeling that poetry should be "between two persons instead of two pages."[1]

The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara edited by Donald Allen (Knopf, 1971), the first of several posthumous collections, shared the 1972 National Book Award for Poetry. Brad Gooch's City Poet is the first substantial biography on O'Hara.

  1. ^ a b American Council of Learned Societies. "Frank O'Hara" in American National Biography. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999)
  2. ^ Doty, Mark in "Myers, Jack and Wojahn, David (editors). A Profile of Twentieth-Century American Poetry. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991).