TY - JOUR
AU1 - Gold, Alexandra J.
AB -  Alexandra J. Gold Salute to the French Negro Poet, Aimé Césaire I. Introduction In the opening lines of “Ode: Salute to the French Negro Poets” (1958), midcentury American poet beckons: “From near the sea, like Whitman my great predecessor, I call/to the spirits of other lands to make fecund my existence” (1–2). O’Hara’s “call” at once registers an entreaty and a commandment, foregrounding a poignant contradiction: the harkening “I” requires external confirmation of its own “existence.” Likewise, the speaker’s concrete identification with “Whitman,” from whom he derives poetic ancestry and voice, is undercut by the ambiguity of the remote “other lands” and airy “spirits” that must birth him. O’Hara’s lines are rife with tension, collapsing spatial proximity and distance, finitude and uncertainty. They exploit the couplet form in these dualities, precariously straddling location and dislocation, a sense of control and a, quite literal, subjection. Yet, if O’Hara’s lines are fraught with indeterminacy, their attachment to poetry is inviolable, as the lyric call remains addressed “To the French Negro Poets.” Consequently, any sense of identification at stake here is one between poets: O’Hara and Whitman, or O’Hara and the one “French Negro Poet” whom he names, Aimé Césaire. O’Hara’s 
TI - Frank O'Hara: Salute to the French Negro Poet, Aimé Césaire
JF - The Comparatist
DA - 2017-11-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/university-of-north-carolina-press/frank-o-hara-salute-to-the-french-negro-poet-aim-c-saire-vN6v0f0055
SP - 257
EP - 272
VL - 41
IS - 
DP - DeepDyve