Kamala Randjelovic

Baudelaire defines a “man of the world” as one “…who understands the world and the mysterious and legitimate reasons behind all its customs” (104) and an “artist” as someone who is “…specialist, a man tied to his palette like a serf to the soil” (104). O’ Hare is both a man of the world and an artist when he utilizes his admiration of the “….eternal beauty and the astonishing harmony of life in the capital cities” (105) as his palette. Baudelaire states that “…few men have the gift of seeing; fewer still have the power to express themselves” (106). While implying that men of the world have the capability of making the things they see “…born again on the paper…beautiful, strange and endowed with an enthusiastic life, like the soul of their creator”(106). O’Hare illustrates this practice presented by Baudelaire in his poems. Like the man of the world, in “A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island”, O’Hare acknowledges the gift the sun gave him of being able to “always embrace things, people earth/ sky stars as I do, freely and with/ the appropriate sense of space”(lines 65-67). Over and Over, O’Hare uses his ability as a man of the world to observe and understand the life in his surroundings. In doing so, he becomes a specialist in his surrounding environment and use his observations as his palette to create art through words from what he sees. As O’Hare goes around New York City in “A Step Away from Them”, he transforms an everyday occurrence such as a group of laborers who “…feed their dirty/ glistening torsos sandwiches/ sandwiches/ and Coca-Cola, with yellow helmets/ on”(Lines 3-6) into characters with an aesthetic symbolic role on the lines of his poem, his own work of art.