While espousing much the same poetic tradition and many similar personal attitudes, O'Hara went neither "on the road" nor, indeed, on any programmatic quest; he was skeptical of almost all the publicized Beat paraphernalia--psychedelics, jazz, pronouncements on prosody, activist politics, occult or formal religious studies. His politics might be summed up by two lines from his "Ode: Salute to the French Negro Poets":
the only truth is face to face, the poem whose
words become your mouth
and dying in black and white we fight for
what we love, not are.
O'Hara's esthetics insisted on an exacting personalized intelligence to pursue common sense. His place was New York with its keen abutments of sophisticated manners and hellishness, reflected in his poems as "just what it is and just what happens." Ginsberg's most particular poem about New York, "My Sad Self," is dedicated to O'Hara, and in later conversation Ginsberg would credit him: "Frank taught me to really see New York for the first time, by making of the giant style of Midtown his intimate cocktail environment. It's like having Catullus change your view of the Forum in Rome."
O'Hara was born in 1926 in Baltimore and grew up in Grafton, Massachusetts.
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