Francis O’Hara, War Poet

Frank O’Hara is a touchstone poet of the post–World War II period. We know him as an exemplary New York poet, cold war poet, queer poet, and postmodern poet.¹ We love O’Hara, too: he’s chatty and arty, casual and funny, eminently quotable. Francis O’Hara, however, was also—even first—a war poet. In 1951, this young writer won the prestigious Hopwood Award at the University of Michigan for a manuscript titled “A Byzantine Place: 50 Poems and a Noh Play.” This still unpublished first book manuscript is deeply informed by war, and informed by war in some surprising ways. While some of the poems in “A Byzantine Place” draw from O’Hara’s service in World War II or take the war as their topic, I argue that O’Hara’s early status as a war poet inheres less powerfully in biography or topicality than it does in the charged silences, unplanned sounds, suspenseful quiets, and acts of listening that suffuse “A Byzantine Place.” Paradoxically, O’Hara’s midcentury poems figure war, a most cacophonous state, through immersion in sudden pauses, hushed “nows,” and eerie stills. I group this collection of formal and thematic effects under the term “sonic suspension,” and it is in that sound world of hushes and pauses that I ultimately locate O’Hara’s poetics of war.

Pause, stillness, listening, quiet—while this lexicon of sonic suspension hardly aligns with ready impressions of O’Hara’s poetics, it contributes to several of the major innovations in latetwentieth-century literary theory and to recent work, in humanities and related social sciences disciplines, on war and the effects of war. Literary theory, of course, has long regarded the gaps and elisions within texts as generative of meaning. To adduce just one of many classic examples in this vein, in his Marxism and Literary Criticism (1976), Terry Eagleton synthesizes Pierre Macherey, Louis Althusser, and other Marxist critics in order to argue that “[i]t is in the significant silences of a text, in its gaps and absences, that the presence of ideology can be most positively felt” (32). To argue that the sonic suspension that permeates “A Byzantine Place” creates an often unspoken repository of war experience is to build on such theoretical attention to silences, gaps, and unsaid things. It is not, however, to insist on a singular or rigid antecedent for all pauses or silences in O’Hara’s work. Multivalence necessarily attends on any literary gap or silence. What distinguishes O’Hara’s silences, pauses, quiets in “A Byzantine Place” is, I contend, their proximity to war and to his specific war experience, predicated as it was on listening.

This approach to what O’Hara might call his “unexpected” early poetics of war also draws on work by scholars in several disciplines who, especially over the past two decades, have investigated the ubiquity of silence in and around both war and everyday violence. Anthropologists including Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Allen Feldman, and Carolyn Nordstrom describe how silence variously enables and follows on the violence that has defined experience for communities in, respectively, Brazil, Northern Ireland, and “the shadows.”² Historian Gyanendra Pandey’s work on post-partition India describes how “the enormity of the violence of ordinary times” results in a “self-imposed silence about the destruction of Partition and events like it” (12). Though such critical work about silence and war grounds my concentration on the sonic suspensions of O’Hara’s World War II poetics in “A Byzantine Place,” I would also note that silence about war is often venerated in U.S. popular history, wherein reticence and modesty about World War II in particular are routinely cited as fundamental virtues of what Tom Brokaw and others have called “the greatest generation.”

“A Byzantine Place”

My focus on a single volume of poems runs counter to both aggregated critical impressions of O’Hara and to his own later self-packaging.³ One does not, in reading O’Hara, focus on a single volume, in part because the poet’s cavalier attitude to saving, collecting, and...