Frank O’Hara’s “Second Avenue” and the Modernist Tradition
2017
The writing of Frank O’Hara, including
his abstract epic, “Second Avenue,” emerged
from a period of conflict in US poetry circles in the 1950s. In his acceptance
speech for the 1960 National Book Award, Robert Lowell de-clared that there
were two competing poetries in post-war America. The “cooked,” he declared, was
“marvelously expert … laboriously concocted to be tasted and digested by a
graduate seminar”; the “raw,” on the other hand, was “huge blood-dripping
gobbets of unseasoned experience … dished up for midnight listeners.” The “cooked” included poets associated with the New Criticism
and their academic contemporaries. Arguing
for a rejection of “the exuberance and excess of Modernism in favor of poems
that were self-contained, ironic, and dense with elaborately constructed
metaphors,” they embraced T.S. Eliot’s “tradition”—that
“no poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone”—and complied with his theory that “the poet himself [can]
have no necessary role in the poetry he writes.”
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