Mourning Lycidas in New York: Frank O’Hara’s James Dean elegies as a poetic coming-of-age narrative

ABSTRACT

This paper examines Frank O’Hara’s two elegiac poems written on the occasion of James Dean’s death in 1955 and investigates their deep-seated yet intriguingly ambivalent relationship with the tradition of pastoral elegy. O’Hara’s poetry is characteristically marked by immediacy, spontaneity, and intimacy. When confronted by the death of his cultural alter ego, however, O’Hara almost self-consciously taps into the cliché-laden, pity-driven tradition of pastoral elegy both to enact a ritual of mourning for the dead and to address his sense of loss and grief. This paper discusses how O’Hara utilizes the rich thematic and rhetorical conventions of the pastoral elegiac tradition without diminishing the authenticity of poetic mourning. Concurrently, this paper further delves into how O’Hara uses a distinctively self-referential quality coded in the genre of elegy as a vehicle for affirming his vocational identity and establishing poetic authority. I will thus argue that James Dean elegies not only commemorate the truncated life of a rebellious young actor but also depict O’Hara’s own poetic rite of passage.

KEYWORDS:

• Frank O’Hara
• pastoral elegy
• James Dean
• poetic mourning
• postwar American poetry

Acknowledgement

This article is based on the author's PhD dissertation, which was completed under the guidance of Professor Tenney Nathanson at the University of Arizona in 2022.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Helen Vendler, Poems, Poets, Poetry: An Introduction and Anthology (Boston: Bedford Books, 1997), p. 14.

2 Ibid., p. 25.

3 Geoffrey Hartman, ‘Toward Literary History’, Daedalus, 99.2 (1970), p. 365.

4 Anthony Libby, ‘O’Hara on the Silver Range’, Contemporary Literature, 17.2 (1976), p. 247.

5 Neil Corcoran, Poetry & Responsibility (Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2014), p. 137.

6 Frank O’Hara, Art Chronicles 1954-1966 (New York: George Braziller, 1975), p. 67.

7 Brad Gooch, City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O’Hara (New York: Harper Perennial, 2014), pp. 267–8.

8 Celeste Marguerite Schenck, Mourning and Panegyric: The Poetics of Pastoral Elegy (University Park: Pennsylvania UP, 1988), p. 14.

9 Samuel Tayler Coleridge, Table Talk of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (London: George Routledge and Sons, 188), p. 242

10 This series of O’Hara’s mock-eclogues includes Amorous Nightmares of Delay: An Eclogue, Grace & George: An Eclogue, Lexington Avenue: An Eclogue, and Loves Labor: An Eclogue. See O’Hara’s Amorous Nightmares of Delay: Selected Plays (1978). O’Hara also wrote a poem called ‘Very Rainy Light, An Eclogue’ which presents a short pastoral dialogue between Daphne and Chloe.

11 Frank O’Hara, The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara, ed. Donald Allen (Berkeley: U of California P, 1995), p. 198.

12 Ibid., p. 197.

13 Frank O’Hara, Poems Retrieved: Frank O’Hara, ed. Don Allen (San Francisco: City Lights & Grey Fox, 2013), p. 161.

14 O’Hara, The Collected Poems, p. 15.

15 At the back of Lunch Poems published by City Lights Books in 1964 appears a short description of the poetry collection written by O’Hara himself. It says: ‘Often this poet, strolling through the noisy splintered glare of a Manhattan noon, has paused at a sample Olivetti to type up thirty or forty lines of ruminations, or pondering more deeply has withdrawn to a darkened ware- or firehouse to limn his computed misunderstandings of the eternal questions of life, co-existence and depth, while never forgetting to eat Lunch his favorite meal … .’

16 William Watkin, In the Process of Poetry: The New York School and the Avant-garde (Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2001), p. 140.

17 Timothy Gray, Urban Pastoral: Natural Currents in the New York School (Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2010), p. 13.

18 Ibid., p. 18.

19 Ibid., p. 18.

20 Ibid., p. 25.

21 Dan Chiasson, ‘Fast Company: The World of Frank O’Hara’, The New Yorker (4 April 2008), https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/04/07/fast-company.

22 O’Hara, The Collected Poems, p. 256

23 Nick Selby, ‘Memory Pieces: Collage, Memorial and the Poetics of intimacy in Joe Brainard, Jasper Johns and Frank O’Hara’, in Robert Hampson and Will Montgomery (eds), Frank O’Hara Now: New Essays on the New York Poet (Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2010), p. 230.

24 O’Hara, The Collected Poems, p. 497.

25 Ibid., pp. 228–9.

26 John Milton, The Complete Poems (London: Penguin Books, 1998), p. 42.

27 Edward F. Edinger, Ego and Archetype (Boston: Shambhala, 1972), p. 31.

28 Andrew Brown, A New Companion to Greek Tragedy (London: Croom Helm, 1983), p. 107.

29 O’Hara, The Collected Poems, p. 229.

30 Ibid., p. 229.

31 Peter M. Sacks, The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1985), p. 22.

32 O’Hara, The Collected Poems, pp. 229–30.

33 David Kennedy, Elegy (London: Routledge, 2007), p. 110.

34 Edith Hamilton, Mythology (Boston: Back Bay Books, 1998), p. 117.

35 John B. Vickery, The Prose Elegy: An Exploration of Modern American and British Fiction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2009), p. 1.

36 Sacks, p. 19.

37 Milton, p. 46.

38 Jahan Ramazani, Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994), p. 10.

39 Ibid., p. 3.

40 Ibid., p. 4.

41 Ibid., p. 29.

42 Ibid., pp. 10–23.

43 Samuel Johnson, Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets with Critical Observations on Their Works, Vol 1. (London: John Murray, Albemarle Street, 1854), p. 140.

44 Ibid., p. 141.

45 Corcoran, p. 141.

46 Ibid., p. 142.

47 O’Hara’s brief statement written for The New American Poetry simultaneously contradicts and reaffirms his poetic style including affectated manner and extravagant gestures as seen in poems such as ‘For James Dean.’ He writes, ‘What is happening to me, allowing for lies and exaggerations which I try to avoid, goes into my poems. I don’t think my experiences are clarified or made beautiful for myself or anyone else; they are just there in whatever form I can find them’. O’Hara, The Collected Poems, p. 500.

48 Sacks, p. 8.

49 Ibid., p. 9.

50 O’Hara, The Collected Poems, p. 300.

51 Ibid., p. 228.

52 Sacks, p. 10.

53 O’Hara, The Collected Poems, p. 231.

54 Gayatry Spivak, ‘Translator’s Preface’, in Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2016), p. xiv.

55 Gooch, p. 159.

56 O’Hara, The Collected Poems, p. 231.

57 Ibid., pp. 232–1.

58 Edward Tayler, Nature and Art in the English Renaissance (New York: Columbia UP, 1964), p. 154.

59 In his ‘Personism: A Manifesto,’ O’Hara states that ‘only Whitman and Crane and Williams, of the American poets, are better than the movies’. O’Hara, The Collected Poems, p. 498. As Lytle Shaw points out, the gesture can be understood ‘as an attempt on O’Hara’s part to distance himself from the institutionalized modernism of the followers of Eliot’. Lytle Shaw. Frank O’Hara: The Poetics of Coterie (Iowa City: University of Iowa P, 2006), p. 271.

60 O’Hara, The Collected Poems, pp. 231–2.

61 Paul Fussell, ‘Whitman’s Curious Warble: Reminiscence and Reconciliation’, in R. W. B Lewis (ed.), The Presence of Walt Whitman: Selected Papers from the English Institute (New York: Columbia UP, 1962), p. 31.

62 According to Gooch, ‘A letter printed in Life magazine pointed out that the appearance of the poem proved “The James Dean necrophilia has penetrated even the upper levels of culture”’. See Gooch, p. 268.

63 O’Hara confessed in a letter to the composer Ben Weber. See Ibid., p. 268.