This chapter addresses different treatments of, and responses to, the monument in modernist literature, by comparing the handling of three equestrian statues in works by Joseph Conrad, Henry James, and Frank O'Hara. These three examples are used to explore a process of remembering and forgetting in relation to commemorative statues to suggest how, over the period of time these instances map, commemorative public art loses its power to commemorate through public forgetfulness and through a post-World-War II rejection of the rhetoric of heroism. In O'Hara's work (in contrast to Robert Lowell's), this devaluation of monuments becomes part of a celebration of the fluid, the ephemeral and the passing, as exemplified through his engagement with film.