"...W.H. Auden famously warned O'Hara against the arbitrary, surrealistic shifts of tone and subject in the poems that he and his friend John Ashbery were writing in the 1950s:
I think you (and John, too, for that matter) must watch what is always the great danger with any "surrealistic" style, namely of confusing authentic non-logical relations which arouse wonder with accidental ones which arouse mere surprise and in the end fatigue.
Auden had not detected the almost opposite motivations behind the "non-logical relations" in O'Hara's and Ashbery's poetry. Ashbery's work, O'Hara said, "is full of dreams and a kind of moral excellence and kind sentiments," while his own "is full of objects for their own sake" that he treats with "ironically intimate observation." But Ashbery's dreamlike sentiments link together whatever happens to be in his mind while he is writing a poem, while O'Hara's "objects for their own sake" are linked together by his sense that, as in Dante's Paradise, everything that has profound value in itself is obscurely but profoundly connected to everything that has similar value.
In fact, in O'Hara's best poems, the relations that Auden called non-logical had a logic of their own. O'Hara was a lapsed Roman Catholic who detached himself cleanly and almost guiltlessly from his religious past. He lost all interest in Catholic theology and morals, but retained an aesthetic sensibility in which saints, shrines, relics, and rituals from wildly different centuries and cultures exist in a single harmonious texture of mutual adoration and love. The abrupt leaps from one object or person to another may look like the arbitrary leaps in Ashbery's poetry, but they have a logic founded in a Catholic sensibility that persisted after O'Hara discarded Catholicism...."
Source: Powell's Books - Review a Day
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