Tale Of Two Cities Comparison
The relationship between literature and city is always more complicated and intimate than we think. From Troy in the Homeric Hymns, to Paris depicted by in The Mysteries of Paris by Eugène Sue, to London in Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, all these cities used their own unique, vivid urban features and culture connotation to inspire the authors. Also, these cities are vitalized by these authors as they are memorized along with these immortal literature masterpieces. In modern and postmodern literature, city itself has evolved from a location to a symbol and a metaphor within the poem, especially when we talk about New York City: the most vigorous area in the United States, that has nurtured the progressive growth of American urban literature,
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The collection was, however, initially requested by Ferlinghetti from City Lights Books in California in 1959. Anecdotes tell us that O’Hara was reluctant to submit his poems for publication and was very careful in choosing which would be published, as Ferlinghetti constantly sends notes like “How about lunch? I am hungry” to remind O’Hara to finish assembling his poems (“Lunch Poems”). O’Hara would reply “cooking” or something similar (Perloff 115). In the very beginning of the book, Frank O’Hara wrote a line of dedication “To Joseph LeSueur,” who was O’Hara’s lover and they shared four apartments in New York between 1955 and 1965. Since most of the poems were written on O’Hara’s lunch hour, both the title and the dedication and their origins are fulfilled with a strong smack of everyday life (274-275, LeSueur). Composing these poems, O’Hara was working in the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and most closely associate with all kinds of artists in late 1950s or 1960s. He constantly worked under limited duration of time and was well conscious of his “present time.” By the time when he was 30 years old, he lamented his life and said that: “Because today I am thirty years old and have so little time left… Chatterton died at eighteen. Keats at twenty-six” (Gooch 283). O’Hara died two years after the publication of Lunch Poems that eventually brought this talented man to the sight of the public. The title however works as a satire metaphor for O’Hara when he lived only half of his life in this fast-paced urban society and dedicated these time to composing
The collection was, however, initially requested by Ferlinghetti from City Lights Books in California in 1959. Anecdotes tell us that O’Hara was reluctant to submit his poems for publication and was very careful in choosing which would be published, as Ferlinghetti constantly sends notes like “How about lunch? I am hungry” to remind O’Hara to finish assembling his poems (“Lunch Poems”). O’Hara would reply “cooking” or something similar (Perloff 115). In the very beginning of the book, Frank O’Hara wrote a line of dedication “To Joseph LeSueur,” who was O’Hara’s lover and they shared four apartments in New York between 1955 and 1965. Since most of the poems were written on O’Hara’s lunch hour, both the title and the dedication and their origins are fulfilled with a strong smack of everyday life (274-275, LeSueur). Composing these poems, O’Hara was working in the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and most closely associate with all kinds of artists in late 1950s or 1960s. He constantly worked under limited duration of time and was well conscious of his “present time.” By the time when he was 30 years old, he lamented his life and said that: “Because today I am thirty years old and have so little time left… Chatterton died at eighteen. Keats at twenty-six” (Gooch 283). O’Hara died two years after the publication of Lunch Poems that eventually brought this talented man to the sight of the public. The title however works as a satire metaphor for O’Hara when he lived only half of his life in this fast-paced urban society and dedicated these time to composing