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Frank O'Hara figured in the Beat scene as one of the major poets (Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, and Robert Duncan would be others) who were close to the leading Beat poets but not actually part of their movement. The friendship and great mutual respect between O'Hara and Allen Ginsberg are well documented in poems and letters. "His feelings for me," said Ginsberg, "seemed to vibrate with my feelings for myself. I think he saw my ideal self-image; he articulated it and made it sound right." With Gregory Corso or Jack Kerouac,on the other hand, O'Hara's relations, though only slightly less admiring, were less close and more subject to touchiness, as evidenced by the anecdote recounted by O'Hara's roommate Joe LeSueur about Kerouac's interrupting a reading by O'Hara at the Living Theater with the words "You're ruining American poetry, O'Hara!," to which O'Hara replied, "That's more than you could ever do!" O'Hara's most obvious distinction from the Beat esthetic was a socioeconomic one.
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