[from a review by Galway Kinnell of Frank O'Hara's Meditations in an Emergency published in Poetry 92 (1958), pp. 178-83]
"O'Hara is not far enough from his subjects to see them. 'I am needed by things,' he writes, but things as such do not appear; instead we find 'giggling fir trees,' and even the scrambled eggs are only symbolic. The interest, rather, is in the poet's feelings, which demand expression, and his skills of evasion, which present it: his way of seeming to mean what he says and at the same time seeming to make fun of it. The poems are less examinations of the dilemma, however, than its products."