SOURCE: Bowers, Neal. “The City Limits: Frank O'Hara's Poetry.” In Frank O'Hara: To Be True to a City, edited by Jim Elledge, pp. 321-33. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990.

In the following essay, Bowers emphasizes the importance of New York City in O'Hara's poetry, yet contends that his association with the city has ultimately devalued his work.

Frank O'Hara and New York City are as inseparable as Whitman and Paumanok or Williams and Paterson; but in a curious way O'Hara, unlike his predecessors, has been diminished by the association. Labeled a member of “The New York School” of poetry, O'Hara has been conveniently identified and filed away by literary taxonomists, despite the insistence by some critics that the designation is limiting and does a disservice to his work.¹ Ironically, the element that makes O'Hara's poems unique and exciting—New York City—has been the source of their...