Meditations in an Emergency by Frank O'Hara
Published 1957 · 7,000 words · Poetry
How hard is Meditations in an Emergency to read?
Meditations in an Emergency scores 31 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 30 out of 100
- O'Hara mixes the everyday — movie stars, street names — with references to painting, music, and literature. The vocabulary is accessible but culturally rich.
- Sentence structure: 40 out of 100
- The prose poems use long, flowing sentences. The verse poems are syntactically loose, following the rhythms of speech and thought. Some passages are deliberately breathless.
- Abstraction: 30 out of 100
- Grounded in immediate experience and feeling. O'Hara reaches for abstraction only momentarily, preferring to stay in the world of specific sensations and encounters.
- Information density: 35 out of 100
- The poems accumulate cultural references and personal details at speed, but the pace is conversational rather than compressed.
- Narrative indirection: 35 out of 100
- O'Hara is usually direct about his feelings and experiences, though the prose poems occasionally achieve indirection through surrealist juxtaposition.
- Symbolic density: 30 out of 100
- O'Hara resists turning things into symbols. The harbormaster poem uses extended metaphor, but most of the collection works through direct statement and description.
- Ironic distance: 30 out of 100
- Warm and sincere rather than ironic. O'Hara's humor is self-deprecating rather than distancing, and his declarations of feeling are unguarded.
- Resolution withholding: 30 out of 100
- The poems typically arrive at clear emotional moments. O'Hara's endings are emphatic rather than ambiguous.
- Structural complexity: 25 out of 100
- A collection of individual poems in free verse and prose poetry. No overarching structure beyond the grouping of related pieces.
How Meditations in an Emergency is regarded
Meditations in an Emergency holds a literary regard score of 81 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.