John Ashbery and English Poetry: A Study of Reading

This thesis analyses the relationship of John Ashbery’s work with English poetry, and in doing so posits that Ashbery’s style of reading, and his unique reading of English poetry specifically, is at the root of his originality in postwar American verse. First, I suggest that Ashbery’s reading, and subsequently his writing are occasioned by their situation, a term I offer as more apt to describe Ashbery than the now commonplace critical rhetoric of ‘experience’ that he has inherited. Secondly, 1 show how this situation is conditioned by Ashbery’s aesthetic of inattention, a poetic strategy by which Ashbery opposes his reading to that of T. S. Eliot and that of his early contemporaries like Robert Lowell. In this, Ashbery represents a reading that emphasises accident, occasion and indeterminacy — that is, elements ‘outside’ the New Critical text. Through this, one sees Ashbery’s history of the present, a poetic in which the present-tense situation of reception is revealed, and in which the past text serves as a resource rather than a source. I finally suggest an analogy between Ashbery as a reader and Ashbery’s conception of his own readers: that is, I describe how Ashbery’s generosity as a writer — in the shape of indeterminacy, a resistance to self-authority and a sense of occasion — is inextricably linked to his generosity, inattention and situatedness as a reader. With these ideas, I also attempt to move Ashbery’s work away from the concepts of influence that have been central to the American construction of his poetry, and to resist the Americanisation of Ashbery that has occurred since his emergence, distorting his achievement by positioning him outside of the English (and indeed European) traditions that are manifestly central to his work. In the broadest terms, however, this thesis offers, within the framework of Ashbery’s mode of reading, an account of the emergence of Ashbery’s style.

In the introduction I describe how I arrived at the various terms listed above, and indicate their value to Ashbery criticism generally. Chapter One then surveys Ashbery’s reading of the metaphysical poetry of John Donne and Andrew Marvell, discussing Ashbery’s investment in metaphysical metaphor and paradox against the backdrop of the prevalent Middle Generation reading of metaphysical verse. Chapter Two considers Ashbery’s engagement with John Clare in the light of his reading of Clare’s narratological descriptive mode and of romantic immanent aesthetics. The third chapter continues the focus of the second, this time analysing Ashbery’s very different relationship with Wordsworth, considering Wordsworth as a poet of Ashbery’s later career, and indeed as a part of a reaction to the dangers of Ashbery’s earlier Clarean poetic. Chapter Four interrogates Ashbery’s relationship with Eliot, and frames a discussion of their various styles of reading with an analysis of their allusive methods. The final chapter brings the thesis full circle, showing how Ashbery’s reading of Auden, ‘the first and most important' according to Ashbery himself, is precisely this: a reading of a poet which, as the central determinant of Ashbery’s authorial relationship with the reader, frames Ashbery’s reading of all other poets.