SOURCE: Molesworth, Charles. “‘The Clear Architecture of the Nerves’: The Poetry of Frank O'Hara.” Iowa Review (summer-fall 1975): 61-74.

In the following essay, Molesworth considers O'Hara's place within the context of modern poetry.

Frank O'Hara's Collected Poems, as profuse in their inventiveness as they are pervasive in their influence, demand that we attempt to judge their place in American poetry. It is not only because these poems skirt the edges of such contiguous but opposing aesthetic qualities as artless simplicity and dazzling elaboration that they are hard to judge. These poems outline their own territory by operating with a high degree of consciousness about themselves as literature, and simultaneously flouting the notions of decorum and propriety. Just when they seem placed, or placeable, in some historical or theoretical classification, they are off again saying such classifications don't matter, and it's clearly wrong-headed of people to ask any poem to...