ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that Frank O’Hara uses the lyric poem to talk about love despite the growing dubiety shown toward its expression in postwar art. O’Hara’s carefully structured mid-career poems offer an arena in which inchoate and often embarrassing feelings become legitimized as emotions when they are shared, deepened, and reflected upon through a dialogue between self and other, or speaker and addressee. O’Hara’s lunch poems, which are equally love poems, draw on the materiality of New York’s public sphere to represent the speaker’s emotions, revealing how the lyric “I” activates, rather than consumes, the city’s visual culture. O’Hara uses the poem to extend the emotional intimacy of the lifeworld to a broader audience in the public sphere. This inclusivity depends upon his use of pronouns and names as placeholders for responsive subjects; since “I” and “you” in these poems may stand for any number of mutually formative selves, O’Hara’s poetry effectively democratizes the lifeworld and the emotions sanctioned therein, establishing a dialogue with his readers via a direct address.
