Frank O'Hara's poetry of desire

In "Personism: A Manifesto" Frank O'Hara writes of his desire for the poem to sit between "two people instead of two pages". This study of Frank O'Hara's poetry recognizes this desire and attempts to understand the relationship between the author and the reader in the poems.;O'Hara's desire becomes complicated in the context of Roland Barthes' essay "The Death of the Author". Barthes petitions for the removal of the author, the erasure of this figure as a site of authority. Consequently, any attempt to reconcile O'Hara's poetry and Barthes' theory reveals a point of tension.;Writing as the construction of desire becomes a concern for Barthes, later, in The Pleasure of the Text.;This study is concerned with the way that O'Hara's poetry responds when it is considered in the realm of Barthes' two works. O'Hara's capacity for both presence and absence as an author forms the basis for this examination. Chapter one establishes the premises for this discussion. Chapter two examines the way that O'Hara's authorial presence resonates. Chapter three considers O'Hara's potential to disappear from the poems. The final chapter considers presence and absence together and examines how they provide a way of understanding The Pleasure of the Text. In this final chapter, O'Hara's poem "In Memory of My Feelings" is examined in depth. (Abstract shortened by UMI.).