Poetry, place, and painting in the works of Frank O'Hara

As with other poets of his generation, Frank O'Hara formed his own poetic identity by rejecting the beliefs of those who came directly before him. For O'Hara, the poet to question and reject was T. S. Eliot and his critical influence. Eliot himself might well have understood that need, "for last year's words belong to last year's language," he wrote in Four Quartets , "and next year's words await another voice" ("Little Gidding" I 118--119).;Frank O'Hara defined himself, both as a man and a poet, as Eliot's antithesis. Eventually, O'Hara would create a modern urban poetry that repudiated Eliot's poetry and the attitudes it conveyed, a repudiation that culminates in O'Hara's Second Avenue, a modern urban epic that both emulates and is antithetical to Eliot's The Waste Land. Having broken free of Eliot's influence and establishing his own poetic manifesto, O'Hara could embrace his generation's dominant art form: painting rather than literature and Abstract Expressionist painting in particular. This new freedom allowed O'Hara to experiment in words with painterly techniques and eventually satisfy one of his great desires---to take part in a true collaboration with a painter, a desire achieved with Larry Rivers and their twelve lithographs entitled Stone.