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“Everything We Want”: Frank O'Hara and the Aesthetics of Free Choice

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Michael Clune
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Abstract

The accumulation of contingent personal details characterizing Frank O’Hara's poetry should be read in relation to his representation of personal choice. Examining O’Hara's poetic and critical texts in the context of American economic and political theory of the fifties, this essay suggests that the question of how personal choice becomes the ordering principle of a poem is identical to the urgent contemporary question of how personal choice becomes the ordering principle of a nation. Cold war discourse depicts personal choice as the guiding principle of a liberal society directed by the sovereign individual citizen. In his personal poetics, O’Hara reverses the liberal dynamic. Instead of reflecting the interiority of the chooser, O’Hara's choices are open to the contingencies of the social environment. Through this radical representation of choice, O’Hara raises the utopian specter of a collective national subject.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 120 , Issue 1: Special Topic: On Poetry , January 2005 , pp. 181 - 196
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2005

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