Having a Coke with You (Critical Overview)

Critical Overview

Although O’Hara never hid his homosexuality, he never wrote openly gay poems until he met Vincent Warren. O’Hara critic Alan Feldman notes that “Having a Coke with You” was one of the last love poems O’Hara wrote to Vincent before he began having doubts about him. Feldman writes that “Having a Coke with You” is about “simple joy,” and that it “evoke[s], perhaps better than any poem in the language, what might be called a date mood.” Feldman explains that “On a date (a really good one, that is) we try to focus on the person we are with as though to extract the maximum amount of pleasure from even the smallest details and gestures.” Biographer Brad Gooch conceptualizes the poem, noting that when O’Hara returned from Spain he became caught up in an exhibit he was working on in his capacity as associate curator and that writing the piece allowed him “to put his work in the proper perspective with life.” Gooch also observes that it was one of O’Hara’s last love poems to Warren, and notes that one possible reason for their breakup was because shortly after O’Hara returned from Spain he discovered that both he and Warren had syphilis. Warren admits that it was probably he that had given it to O’Hara. George Butterick writes that the love poems O’Hara wrote to Warren, including “Having a Coke with You” “are all affirmative, delicate, precise, poems of frontal immediacy, heartfelt, with feeling no longer hidden behind a bravado of brilliant images and discordant segments.” Critic Helen Vendler is forward in her assessment of the poem, claiming that it is “one of the most beautiful of many [of O’Hara’s] love poems.”