Abstract
Frank O’Hara (1926–1966) was a prominent American poet and art critic. He is known for his affiliation with the New York School, a loosely defined group of artists, writers, and musicians who drew on movements such as abstract expressionism and surrealism in their work. Despite being intimately connected with music and visual art throughout his life, O’Hara considered himself, and was best known, as a poet. Much of O’Hara’s poetry is characterized by its personal tone, ostensible spontaneity, and rootedness in New York City, a place he documented fastidiously during his lunchtime walks while working at the Museum of Modern Art. The publication of O’Hara’s third volume of poetry, the seminal Lunch Poems (1964), solidified his reputation as one of America’s most important postwar poets in the years preceding his untimely death, aged just 40, when he was hit by a dune buggy on Fire Island, off the south shore of Long Island, New York.
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References
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Heeney, J. (2022). Frank O’Hara and the New York Poets. In: Tambling, J. (eds) The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Urban Literary Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62419-8_302
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