Frank O’Hara and the End of Bureaucracy

Abstract:Frank O’Hara wrote his poems in an American work environment that was, at mid-century, becoming increasingly defined by bureaucracy and its corresponding ethos of organization, efficiency, administration, and paperwork. O’Hara’s reaction to bureaucracy was undoubtedly an ambivalent one: though O’Hara’s work periodically includes signs that he found administrative routine and structure appealing, he was ultimately not able to ignore what he perceived as dehumanizing and even perilous about bureaucratic norms in the cold war era. To counter the deleterious nature of a highly administered society, O’Hara sought to explore the utopian purpose of his writing, wherein poetry might offer an alternative to bureaucratic schedules and temporality, the stultifying tedium of office work, and the bellicose mentality of the cold war period.