Word: poetes
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...City Poet: The Life and Times...
Frank O'Hara's short life, somewhat surprisingly, does not always make for the best reading. The poet laureate of 1950s bohemian New York passed his first 20 years in relative quiet, leading a withdrawn existence in a small Massachussetts town. And despite the assurance on the book jacket of Brad Gooch's City Poet that O'Hara's accidental death at 40 struck down a poet "at the height of his powers," this book portrays these last years as more consumed by depression and alcoholism than creative passion...
...while the hefty and turbulent mid-section of this biography is fascinating, it is dragged down at either end by a surplus of mundane details. Quoting extensively from O'Hara's letters, journals and an unpublished novel, Gooch recounts in painstaking detail the poet's placid early years and his startingly unconfrontational outlook. In those years, the poet conformed at least externally to American middle class expectations, escorting girl-friends to prom, enlisting for service in World War II, writing home affectionate letters filled with responsible advice for his younger siblings. Although filled with vague bohemian aspirations and troubled...
...City Poet really gets off the ground only when it comes to O'Hara's Harvard years. When he enrolled there after the war on the G.I. Bill, he joined an undergraduate population containing an astonishing number of future luminaries, including John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Donald Hall, Adrienne Rich, Harold Brodkey, Alison Lurie, Robert Bly and Robert Creeley. By sophomore year O'Hara and Edward Gorey, his roommate at Eliot House, occupied the center of a flourishing artistic and social scene whose campy, brittle style was a bald rip-off of Oscar Wilde and characters out of Evelyn Waugh...
Still, the story of the poet's circle is a fascinating one, and Gooch proves expert at handling this heady mix of characters. The Harvard section explores the exploits of a set of young men and women almost unbelievably concerned with art and confident of their ability to produce it. City Poet recalls an era when a dispute over the relative merits of Eliot and Stevens could strain a friendship, when a pro-Yeats faction at the Advocate battled with a pro-Auden contingent of modernist mavericks, and when the smoke-filled Grolier Bookshop was a bona-fide artists' hangout...