ODE ON NECROPHILIA
by Frank O’Hara
“Isn’t there any body you want back from the grave? We were less generous in our time.” Palinarus (not Cyril Connolly)
Well, it is better that OMEON S love them E and we so seldom look on love that it seems heinous source
Not to disappoint corpse-cuddler, but the poem's subject isn't literal. Another poet (I don't know who) told Frank O'Hara that his sequence of elegies for the recently-deceased James Dean were "like necrophilia" and this poem is the response.
"Palinarus" is a character in The Aeneid whose shade cannot rest. And also the nom de plume of Cyril Connolly when Connolly first published The Unquiet Grave.
So the poem is Frank O'Hara saying, "Hey, I'm not just being horny for the memory of a hot young dead guy, I'm participating in the long literary tradition of mourning someone in poetry," like the Romantic poets who inspired O'Hara and Connolly.
thanks for some background on this. no disappointment here, necrophilia is a part of everyone's lives in a way, and I think that's beautiful, in whichever way its present. if you just take the word "philia", love, at face value, it can really be many things.
