SOURCE: Eberly, David. “A Serpent in the Grass: Reading Walt Whitman and Frank O'Hara.” In The Continuing Presence of Walt Whitman: The Life after the Life, edited by Robert K. Martin, pp. 69-81. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992.

In the following essay, Eberly finds parallels between the poetry of Walt Whitman and Frank O'Hara.

Born almost one hundred years apart, Walt Whitman and Frank O'Hara lived to chronicle their eras while exposing their most intimate selves. Both gay, they explored their sexuality and the “city of orgies, walks and joys”—Manhattan—which protected and nourished it, providing “lovers, continual lovers.”¹ While Whitman anxiously sought a public exposure and approval which O'Hara shirked, both faced incomprehension and denigration of their work by many of their early readers. Both, too, produced a prodigious amount.

The similarities between these two poets are even more striking if one recalls not the...