John Ashbery and English Poetry 9780748644766

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John Ashbery and English Poetry

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John Ashbery and English Poetry

Ben Hickman

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© Ben Hickman, 2012 Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9LF www.euppublishing.com Typeset in 10.5/13 pt Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 4475 9 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 4476 6 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 0 7486 4922 8 (epub) ISBN 978 0 7486 4921 1 (Amazon ebook) The right of Ben Hickman to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Contents

Acknowledgements Abbreviations Introduction

vi viii 1

1

Lost words: Donne, Marvell and Ashberyan metaphor

27

2

‘The music of all present’: Ashberyan description and the presence of John Clare

54

‘Always articulating these preludes’: landscape, Wordsworth, ‘A Wave’ and after

82

3 4

‘These decibels’: Eliot, Ashbery and allusion

106

5

The first and most important influence: Ashbery and Auden

132

Bibliography Index

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Acknowledgements

First thanks go to David Herd, whose enthusiasm and generosity, as both PhD supervisor and mentor, have made this book possible. I should also acknowledge his book, John Ashbery and American Poetry, which, along with John Shoptaw’s On the Outside Looking Out, first introduced me to Ashbery. Stephen Paul Miller, Donna Landry, Michael Schmidt, Jan Montefiore, Kat Peddie, Peter Falconer and Adam Dudley have all read, suggested revisions on and substantially improved the manuscript in its various drafts, and it is a pleasure to thank them for this here. Particular gratitude also goes to John Ashbery and David Kermani, who have both been most generous with their time in answering my many questions. My two trips to Harvard University have been invaluable, and I would like to thank the staff of the Houghton Library, as well as of the University of Kent and the British Library. Thanks also go to the University of Kent for much-appreciated financial and academic assistance. I should also thank the Arts and Humanities Research Council for funding part of the research. I will always be indebted to Katie Willis, whose love and support throughout the writing of this thesis, as I hope she knows, I will never forget. A final thank you goes to my parents, John and Anita, for reasons they well know. Excerpts from John Ashbery’s work published in Some Trees, Rivers and Mountains, The Double Dream of Spring, Three Poems, Houseboat Days, As We Know, Shadow Train, A Wave, April Galleons, Flow Chart, Hotel Lautréamont and And the Stars Were Shining are copyright © 1956–2008 by John Ashbery, and used by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc. and Carcanet Press for the author. All rights reserved. Excerpts from ‘Nor was that final, for about that time’, ‘Control of the passes was, he saw, the key’, ‘From the very first coming down’, ‘Sir, no

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man’s enemy, forgiving all’ and ‘Will you turn a deaf ear’ are copyright © The Estate of W. H. Auden, and used by permission of The Wylie Agency. An early and partial version of Chapter 3 appeared in Comparative American Studies (7:4), and my gratitude goes to Nick Selby for the use of extracts from that essay here. Parts of the material on John Clare in Chapter 2 have been significantly expanded in an essay included in the 2011 issue of The John Clare Society Journal, and my thanks go to Simon Kövesi for the use of the original material.

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Abbreviations

See bibliography for detailed citations. AG: April Galleons, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988 [1987]. AWK: As We Know, Manchester: Carcanet, 1981 [1979]. CB: Can You Hear, Bird, Manchester: Carcanet, 1996. DDS: The Double Dream of Spring, New York: Ecco, 1976 [1970]. FC: Flow Chart, Manchester: Carcanet, 1991. HD: Houseboat Days, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999 [1977]. HL: Hotel Lautréamont, Manchester: Carcanet, 1992. OT: Other Traditions: The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000. RM: Rivers and Mountains, New York: Ecco, 1977 [1966]. RS: Reported Sightings: Art Chronicles, 1957–1987, New York: Knopf, 1989. ShTr: Shadow Train, New York: Viking, 1981. SP: Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, Manchester: Carcanet, 1977 [1975]. SPr: Selected Prose, Manchester: Carcanet, 2004. SS: And the Stars Were Shining, Manchester: Carcanet, 1994. ST: Some Trees, New York: Corinth, 1970 [1956]. TCO: The Tennis Court Oath, Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1977 [1962]. TP: Three Poems, New York: Viking, 1972. VN: The Vermont Notebook, Vermont: Z, 2001 [1975]. W: A Wave, Manchester: Carcanet, 1984.

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Introduction

In 1975, John Ashbery, who had by this time been writing poetry for over thirty years, published ‘Tenth Symphony’ in his most famous volume, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. The poem speaks with unease of Anglo-American, and Anglo-Ashberyan, poetic relations: There is some connexion (I like the way the English spell it They’re so clever about some things Probably smarter than we are Although there is supposed to be something We have that they don’t – don’t ask me What it is. And please don’t talk of openness. I would pick Francis Thompson over Bret Harte Any day, if I had to) Among this. It connects up. (SP, 46–7)

Ashbery’s anxieties about the supposed ‘something / We have that they don’t’ are only exacerbated by considerations of what that distinction may be. Clichés of ‘openness’ give us only the celebrity all-American pioneer-poet Bret Harte, whose particularly American ‘something’ Ashbery later characterised as being ‘loud-mouthed . . . in boots and a cowboy hat’.1 Despite the problems Ashbery encounters trying to compare English and American traditions, however, he none the less acknowledges some ‘connexion’ ‘among’, though not perhaps fully between, them. Some of Ashbery’s critics have been less uncertain of their national cultural heritage, and have taken an uncomplicated view of Ashbery as a distinctly ‘American’ poet. For every time Ashbery has noted his debts to non-American poetry, there has usually been an American critic denying them on his behalf. Ashbery’s most influential commentator, Harold Bloom, has been dismissive of Ashbery’s long-standing engagement with French poetry, claiming that ‘Ashbery turned to French poetry as

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a deliberate evasion of continuities [to deny] the “central” kind of poet he is fated to become in the line of Emerson, Whitman, Stevens.’2 Susan Schultz, editor of The Tribe of John, an important essay collection on Ashbery, claims that ‘no poet since Whitman has tapped into so many distinctly American voices’ as the New York poet.3 For Helen Vendler, meanwhile, Ashbery ‘sometimes sounds like Charles Ives in his irrepressible Americana’, enunciating ‘timeless, representative truths in an American vernacular’, through the ‘pure Americanness of his diction’.4 Even Marjorie Perloff, for different reasons, claims Ashbery for America in claiming him for an essentially US-based postmodernity.5 These are the critics that have largely defined the discourse surrounding Ashbery’s work. It is little surprise, therefore, that many readers have assumed Ashbery’s ‘Americanism remains obvious and inescapable’.6 Ashbery is, of course, an American; but it is puzzling to read Ashbery after being told he is ‘like Charles Ives in his irrepressible Americana’. Ashbery’s own account of his work is a direct repudiation of such claims: ‘I’ve always read English poetry much more than American poetry, and I feel that English poetry is more important to my work than American,’ he says.7 Ashbery has anxieties about certain constructions of Americanness. Discussing his reception in England, he notes: Americans, if they’re going to be accepted as writers, have to act ‘like Americans’. They have to be loud-mouthed, oratorical. That might be why Whitman was very widely accepted, and they loved Bret Harte, whom nobody reads anymore, just because he came to England and walked around in boots and a cowboy hat. This is an American, so we can, you know, we can understand this, because the Americans are a bunch of Yahoos.8

The poet could equally be speaking of some of his compatriots. Ashbery is frustrated that readers have been led to believe his poetry ‘to be certifiably American’ – ‘I don’t think my poetry is,’ he says; it is ‘influenced by English poetry’.9 Though he embodies the essential synergy of English and American traditions that has been a feature of American poetry from Whitman to Pound, Ashbery distances himself from an Americana characterised as the opposite of European sophistication.10 In a 1984 letter to the English poet John Ash, for example, Ashbery writes: ‘Presently I’m reading Huckleberry Finn for the first time (I was a snobbish child and read only English or French lit); it’s actually quite good.’11 Whereas a contemporary like Charles Olson studies ‘American Civilization’ and subsequently devotes his time to Herman Melville, deciding fairly early on to ‘become an American’, Ashbery begins his career operating with a singularly Anglophile sensibility. Reading Thomas Traherne rather than Captain John Smith, Mary Butts rather than Herman Melville, and

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Edith Sitwell rather than William Carlos Williams, Ashbery, for reasons that will be explored in this book, seeks a tradition quite different to the Pound–Williams nexus that most poets associated with the New American Poetry had accepted as the means to dislodge the Anglocentric ‘academic’ verse of the 1950s.12 Ashbery’s tastes are, of course, far more diverse than most of his contemporaries (Ashbery has no equivalent to Olson’s Pound or Ginsberg’s Williams), and only so much can be gleaned by reviewing his reading materials. Clearly, however, the centrality of poets like Henry Vaughan, Andrew Marvell, Thomas Lovell Beddoes and John Clare to Ashbery’s achievements, along with nearcontemporaries like Nicholas Moore, F. T. Prince and W. H. Auden, show a poet reading in a manner quite foreign to most other American poets of his time, from both mainstream and avant-garde movements.13 To read Ashbery for his purported ‘pure Americanness’, therefore, is not to contextualise him, but to impose vague American stereotypes on to the poet in order to claim him, along with a number of other writers, for a certain version of the culture. That for Vendler, who is typical in this regard, this culture is exceptionalist and conservative is obvious from her Harvard Book of Contemporary American Poetry (1985), where she writes: This anthology of American poetry will be able to extend its charm only to those who genuinely know the American language – by now a language separate . . . The mixed poverty and riches of the United States have brought into being a poetry that differs from that of England . . . In America – an enormous wilderness only recently settled, educationally and ethnically diverse . . . poetry was bound to be diffuse, heterogeneous.14

It is, of course, necessary to distance the cosmopolitan Ashbery from such confused jingoism. More general problems have been created by constructions of an ‘American plainness’ in Ashbery’s work, however. That is, the project to nationalise Ashbery appeals to a particular sense of tradition that has fundamentally distorted the engagement with the art of the past that we witness in Ashbery’s work. Since Ashbery’s entry into mainstream literary culture in the mid1970s, following the appearance of his major mature work in Rivers and Mountains (1966), The Double Dream of Spring (1970) and Three Poems (1972), and its culmination in the Pulitzer, National Book and National Book Critics’ Circle Award-winning Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975), two Ashberys have emerged from a battleground of warring interpretations. These are being increasingly challenged, but the Romantic and the avant-garde Ashberys continue to hold the field, and consequently to determine the vocabulary in which Ashbery’s distinctive

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poetics, as well as his supposed cultural politics, are discussed.15 The blurb of Ashbery’s Selected Poems, for example, defining Ashbery as both a ‘successor to Wallace Stevens’ and ‘the éminence grise of postmodernism’, shows how these critical constructions have influenced even the casual reader of Ashbery’s work. The aim in both cases is to limit the ways Ashbery’s poetry can be read by limiting the poetry Ashbery is perceived to have read. Ashbery’s Romanticism has usually been described in order to establish him as the heir of Wallace Stevens.16 This objective has not only meant the bizarre exclusion of Auden from accounts of Ashbery’s work; it has also distorted Ashbery’s sense of tradition generally. Bloom, who argues the link between Romanticism and a distinctly American literature most vigorously, attributes the most unreconstructed Romanticism to Ashbery’s work, lauding the poet for his ‘gorgeous solipsism’, his ‘rapt meditation’, and as ‘essentially a ruminative poet . . . knowing always that what counts is the mythology of self’.17 The ‘Keatsian, Stevensian context’ of Vendler’s Ashbery, likewise, gives us ‘a generalising poet, allegorizing and speculating and classifying as he goes, leaving behind, except for occasional traces, the formative world of circumstances’.18 ‘Ashbery,’ Vendler says, ‘like Coleridge, who found all life an interruption of what was going on in his mind, lives in the “chronic reverie” of the natural contemplative.’19 Such Romanticism abstracts Ashbery from the material world in general, and particularly denies any debt the poet may have to the past. For the key feature of Romanticism, for both these critics, is its transcendence of history; as Bloom says, ‘the Wordsworthian light of all our day turns out to be: self-reliance.’20 For Bloom especially, Ashbery’s Romanticism is a form of Transcendentalism: the poet is, writes Bloom, ‘in the line of Emerson, Whitman and Stevens’, and ‘most himself when most ruefully and intensely Transcendental’.21 In claiming Ashbery for the Emersonian strain, Bloom allies Ashbery with a writer whose own transcendence of history, and English history especially, constitutes his very influence on the present; Bloom suggests a similar transcendence is to be found in Ashbery’s work. Ashbery’s reading of the past is not simply narrowed by such Romantic readings; it is excluded as a relevant subject for discussion. The avant-garde Ashbery is, of course, more grounded in historical reality – it does well, for example, to explain Ashbery’s fragmentation in a way that goes beyond nods to George Herbert and P. B. Shelley.22 The stress on Ashbery’s avant-gardism has had similar objectives when it comes to describing his reading of past poetry, however. In her attempt to describe Ashbery in terms of a postmodernist breakthrough,

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Perloff challenges the label of late Modernist in a way that severely limits his poetic heritage to all but the most prophetically avant-garde poets. Ashbery, once the hermetic late Romantic, is now the subversive avant-garde iconoclast whose poetry, in contradistinction even with The Waste Land, typifies a ‘refusal to “mean” in conventional ways’ or ‘conform to a coherent pattern’.23 There are and have been, no doubt, poets whose radicalism extends to such extremes, but readers are right to feel that Ashbery is not one of them. For if Perloff rejects an Ashberyan Romanticism, she also deems such a wide range of poetry to be ‘Romantic’, including Auden’s early work and The Waste Land, that virtually all notion of the past in Ashbery is removed. The result is an avant-garde Ashbery so overstated, of such unimaginable destructive power, that we barely recognise him. While it does not make sense to cast Ashbery as a Coleridgean dreamer, neither is it helpful to position Ashbery as a forerunner of Language poetry (Perloff’s implicit objective). As a poet who places reading at the centre of his poetic procedure, Ashbery does not, as Perloff suggests, rebuild poetry from the bottom up like Arthur Rimbaud or Gertrude Stein (other subjects of her ‘Poetics of Indeterminacy’), after clearing away the obliterated debris of High Modernism and Romanticism’s traditionalist monuments. These Romantic and avant-garde versions of Ashbery present themselves as mutually exclusive. This need not be the case. If we consider Ashbery as not necessarily ‘a Romantic’, but a reader of Romanticism, we can include other poetries of the past as constituent of his work. Likewise, defining Ashbery’s avant-gardism as a distinctive recycling of the past allows us keep sight of both his experimentalism and his reading practices, meaning we can provide a more interesting description of Ashberyan literary history. Affixing preconceived labels to Ashbery, that is to say, does not describe his ‘tradition’, because Ashbery redefines the way we think about a major poet’s relationship to artistic tradition. The descriptions of Ashbery above assume there is a set way in which a poet is influenced by the past, and proceed from there to define the focus of that influence, the ‘line’ he works in. What needs to be discussed when talking about Ashbery, however, is how the poet challenges the very notions of influence and poetic genealogy. In this, of course, Ashbery is much more the avant-gardist than the Romantic, but he is an experimentalist in quite an unconventional sense; literary history remains central to his work in a broadly non-confrontational manner. His is a sustained use of the poetry of the past, not its Rimbaudian destruction. Ashbery, I will argue, has a style of reading that is central to his writing. By style I mean something similar to a ‘way’, but also something different. T. S. Eliot, for example, with his ‘historical sense’, has a way

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of reading, and gives critical guidelines on how to achieve it. Ashbery overturns Eliotic paradigms: for him, reading is inseparable from the act of writing, and since this book will see his reading as embodied in his own poetry, style is more apt to describe the process. It is this style of reading, therefore, that forms the background against which Ashbery’s work should be read. In so far as my aims are descriptive here, I offer, within the framework of a reading style, an account of the development of Ashbery’s own poetic style. Though it is not my intention to marginalise the various American, French, Russian and other traditions Ashbery has engaged with throughout his long career, and which could all be the subject of a similar book to this, the central claim here is that Ashbery is stylistically original because of an original style of reading of English poetry. Ashbery reading style, that is, originates in a reading of English poetry. It is not simply that Ashbery has a reading habit that attaches itself to English poetry, but, as I will explain, that his style of reading evolves out of an engagement with the most important figures of his early career, which happen to be predominantly English figures: Marvell, Donne, Clare, Auden and others. * * * We must ask, therefore, how we are to describe this style of reading. There have traditionally been three methodological options open to such a study of reading: theories of influence, intertextuality and reader response. Theories of influence have been especially applied to Ashbery – mainly, again, because of the effect of Bloom’s criticism. Bloom’s antitextuality, where ‘a poet’s consciousness of a competing poet is itself a text,’ immediately limits the utility of influence in explaining Ashbery’s work, which lays so much emphasis on formal experimentation and poetic style.24 The focus influence has laid on expressionism and ahistoricism has, furthermore, lead to the disregard of ‘extrinsic’ material that Ashbery, as I will demonstrate, makes so intrinsic to the writing of poetry. Because Bloom’s concern as a critic is with ‘the poet in a poet, or the aboriginal poetic self’, his project in talking about Ashbery is not only to bypass the poetry’s textual surface, but also to disregard the situation of the writing – a situation which is, from the New York and Paris avant-garde milieus of the very early work to the situational aesthetics of ‘The Skaters’, ‘Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror’ and ‘A Wave’, crucial to understanding Ashbery.25 As we have seen, the Romanticism of this ‘poetic self’ is what constitutes both the historicity of the poet and, as ‘aboriginal’, its simultaneous negation. Intertextuality does things rather differently, and can be suggestive when thinking about Ashbery. Julia Kristeva could be describing

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Ashbery’s work when she outlines the readerly structure of writing: the ‘coordinates of dialogue are writing subject, addressee, and exterior texts’, she says, adding that the reader ‘fuses with this other discourse, this other book, in relation to which the writer has written his own text. Hence the horizontal axis (subject–addressee) and the vertical axis (text–context) coincide’.26 That Ashbery situates himself, as a reader, in a position analogous to his own readers is a point I will take up later. There are problems already implicit in Kristeva’s description, however, in its suggestion of a static network or axes of textual relations. Intertextuality rightly constructs a theory of reading in which authors are no longer the centre of consideration (an ‘author-crisis’ Ashbery very much witnessed living in Paris between 1955 and 1965), and its attempt to ‘abolish the distance between writing and reading’ undoubtedly speaks to Ashbery’s poetics. The problem comes when we attempt to describe what the author does in these relations, or where he or she is. The author is replaced in intertextual theory by a multiplicity of texts and readers – what Roland Barthes terms ‘dissemination’.27 ‘Dissemination’ does not simply remove the author from the scene of writing, however; it also abstracts him from the situation and context of text and reader. At the end of ‘The Death of the Author’, Barthes famously writes: the reader is the very space in which are inscribed, without any of them being lost, all the citations out of which writing is made . . . the reader is a man without history, without biography, without psychology; he is only that someone.28

Barthes’s ‘passably empty subject’, infinite rather than specific, extends its emptying of psychological depth to erase all trace of context and situatedness from the site of reading and writing.29 Again, we are left with terms unable to describe the situation of both poet and reader. Reader-response criticism, finally, does offer an empirical account of the reading process. Reading, Stanley Fish writes, should be ‘regarded not as leading to meaning but as having meaning’.30 The nature of reading described by theorists like Fish is surprisingly abstract, however. Practical reader-response criticism, according to Fish, is an analysis of the developing responses of the reader in relation to the words as they succeed one another in time . . . The basis of the method is a consideration of the temporal flow of the reading experience, and it is assumed that the reader responds in terms of that flow and not to the whole utterance.31

Reading is a temporal flow, and essentially uninterruptable. Anything ‘outside’ the text is not reading: ‘to consult dictionaries, grammars,

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and histories is to assume that meanings can be specified independently of the activity of reading,’ writes Fish.32 This incorrectly assumes that readers make no attempt to interpret, reread or even think about anything alongside the flow of the reading experience. The shortcoming here is again idealism, in an account of reading that assumes perfect attention to ‘the work’. Such idealism is particularly problematic when applied to Ashbery, for attention is precisely what is troubled in his poetic accounts of reading and his own poetic practices. Ashbery’s readerly responses are, as I will argue, uniquely defined by what is ‘independent of the activity of reading’. All three of these methodologies, then, are unable to describe adequately the two aspects that I shall suggest are central to Ashbery’s reading: his sense of situation, or his ‘history of the present’, and his aesthetics of inattention. We now need to define these interrelated concepts. The vitality of the New York School, a determining force in Ashbery’s work until at least the mid-1950s when he first left the group’s collaborative atmosphere for Paris, was how it read. As many critics have noted, what was distinctive about this reading was its capacious proclivity for variety. Mark Silverberg’s recent, authoritative study on New York School taste outlines the poets’ ‘project to free American taste from elitist assumptions reinforced by the academic bent of 1950s poetry with Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot as the reigning authorities’.33 The range of the group’s literary tastes is well documented. A list of the various writers associated with a ‘New York School tradition’ over the years would run to some pages: a result of the coming together of the simultaneously inspiring and repressive ‘English Canon’ most of the poets had studied at Harvard in the late 1940s, their commitment to European literary and non-literary avant-gardes, and a unique appetite for the undiscovered and marginal. While Ashbery was reading Edith Sitwell, F. T. Prince and Elizabeth Bowen, Frank O’Hara was immersing himself in Russian literature, Auden, Apollinaire and William Carlos Williams; Kenneth Koch was, as Ashbery recalls, ‘fascinated with Renaissance epics’ and ‘in constant dialogue with English poetry, particularly Byron and Shelley’; and James Schuyler, in addition to his predilection for minor nature writers like Dorothy Wordsworth and John Clare, was enjoying Harriet Beecher Stowe and Sir Walter Scott.34 Locus Solus, the magazine Ashbery and other New Yorkers produced in the early 1960s, clearly placed an emphasis on variety, as distinct from the strict selection policies of Eliotic publications like The Criterion. The five issues of Locus Solus contained, among other things, the Troubadours, Abraham Cowley, Beat poets, ninth-century Chinese and fifteenth-

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century Japanese poetry, Dwight Eisenhower, Sir John Suckling, Robert Southey and the Italian Futurists. If anything defined the group of poets, it was their reading habits. The climate of personal and group definition through reading is revealed in a letter Ashbery wrote in August 1950 to his painter-friend, Jane Freilicher: I’m reading The White Devil by Webster, a rather charming novel by Mary Webb called ‘Armor Wherein He Trusted’ . . . I’m also reading the poems of Prior, whom Kenneth would love, I’m sure – he writes in a very familiar style, rather like Auden in Letters from Iceland. And Edith Sitwell: I love her early stuff more and more, but certainly can’t take a long poem called Gold Coast Customs, which she considers her Waste Land; it is easily the most intolerable poem ever written . . . I still have to finish D. H. Lawrence (groan) . . . Here’s a comforting little poem from Nicholas Moore . . . It sounds as though he wrote it to Kenneth Koch about John Ashbery.35

A busy summer by anybody’s standards. In contrast to the impressive literary range of Eliot or Pound, the texts above have very little connection to each other, and no attempt is made to suggest any. Ashbery’s comments are never content- or concept-based, but always exaggerated, even camp, value-judgements. Ashbery explains this attitude in relation to Eliotic aesthetics in 1968, noting that the New York School’s defining feature was that ‘our program was the absence of any program.’ Whereas Eliot invents the reading programme, with a comprehensive ‘historical sense’ that had become so influential in post-war American poetry, Ashbery describes his reading practices as eliding even understanding: When I read a poem I don’t read it first for understanding. I quoted Gertrude Stein recently, when she says, ‘You have enjoyed it and therefore you have understood it.’ I can tell when I’m enjoying it, and then if I’ve enjoyed it I might go back and read it for the sense that has to be there, I guess, for me to have enjoyed it.36

We certainly would not go to Ashbery for an ‘interpretation’ of a text. Ashbery insists on pleasure or ‘enjoyment’, and is aware, as Susan Sontag was in her seminal essay ‘Against Interpretation’, or as Roland Barthes was in The Pleasure of the Text, that such an insistence has a political content under certain circumstances. In a review of Pierre Bonnard, Ashbery notes that ‘Pleasure – undiluted essence of pleasure – is a suspect commodity in modern art’ (RS, 54). Leavis and Bloom in literary criticism, Kant and Shelley in Romanticism, Adorno and Althusser in leftist cultural theory, are all figures Ashbery might have in mind.

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Under Leavis’s proscription of art lacking ‘moral seriousness’, Bloom’s dismissal of the New York School as a rabble of mere ‘comedians of the spirit’ that Ashbery somehow transcended, Romanticism’s privileging of a painful sublime over a pleasant picturesque, and Adorno’s famous proclamation that ‘there can be no lyric poetry after Auschwitz’, the twentieth century has found itself at various moments treating pleasure as a taboo, a contamination by triviality of the important educational role that art must play in modern culture.37 Ashbery rejects such a role for art. But is he then simply a modern-day aesthete? We can see how Ashbery’s stance is opposed to aestheticism, or at least inverts its traditional priorities, by looking at its original forms. Walter Pater, to whom Ashbery has often alluded in poems, and whom he often resembles in the style of his art criticism, had already laid out a seminal ‘program that is the absence of any program’, of which the aesthete in Ashbery would no doubt approve. ‘What is this song or picture’, Pater asks in his 1873 Preface to The Renaissance, ‘to me? What effect does it really produce on me? Does it give me pleasure? And if so, what degree of pleasure?’38 The key to pleasure for Pater is abstraction. Pater’s readings intentionally occur in historical vacuums; we get from him neither an idea of the historical context in which the work was produced, nor of the situation in which it is being viewed or read. Pater seeks ‘to disengage this virtue from the commoner elements with which it may be found in combination . . . casting off all debris, and leaving us only what the heat of the imagination has wholly fused and transformed’.39 The world must be set aside in order to attain this position of ‘repose’: For us in the modern world, with its conflicting claims, its entangled interests, distracted by so many sorrows, so many preoccupations, so bewildering an experience, the problem of unity with ourselves, in blitheness and repose, is far harder than it was for the Greek within the simple terms of antique life. Yet, not less than ever, the intellect demands completeness, centrality.40

Though Pater heralds a new period in aesthetic attitudes, his ideas here build on the foundations of the earliest philosophical aesthetics, most notably on the thought of David Hume, who writes in 1757: [To] try the force of any beauty or deformity . . . we must choose the proper time and place, and bring the fancy to a suitable situation and disposition. A perfect serenity of mind, a recollection of thought, a due attention to the object; if any of these circumstances be wanting, our experiment will be fallacious, and we shall be unable to judge of the catholic and universal beauty.41

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For Hume, the idea of finding a universal ‘Standard of Taste’ is a difficult but only seemingly impossible task. He sees the job of aesthetic perception as to resolve such disagreements by achieving an unimpeded view of the object. What he means by ‘situation’, therefore, is the absence of situation, a generalised and ideal abyss in which the connection between object and perceiver is not interfered with: ‘particular incidents and situations occur which either throw a false light on the objects, or hinder the true from conveying to the imagination the proper sentiment and perception’.42 It is precisely Hume’s ‘particulars’ and Pater’s ‘bewildering experience’ that Ashbery invites into his work. For Ashbery’s ‘program [that is] the absence of any program’ has its own logic; it is not the ideal detachment of aestheticism, but an openness and attentiveness to the present occasion: ‘I guess it amounts to not planning the poem in advance but letting it take its own way: of living in a state of alert and being ready to change your mind if the occasion seems to require it,’ Ashbery clarifies.43 The poet’s remarkable habit of rarely rereading even the work he enjoys is part of this stress on the immediate situation of reading: ‘I don’t read the poets I was influenced by when I was young anymore, because I’d already read them.’44 This is echoed in Ashbery’s criticism, where pleasure, undoubtedly a major concern in such work, is rooted to a sense of presence in the world. Ashbery says of John Wheelwright in his Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, for example: ‘where I cannot finally grasp his meaning, which is much of the time, I remain convinced by the extraordinary power of his language as it flashes by on its way from somewhere to somewhere else’ (OT, 72). Ashbery characterises the ideal reception of his own work in similar terms: A person might understand [my poems] better in readings because he is forced to listen to them in real time. He can’t go back and try to make sense of this line or that, as he could if he were reading it in a book: if something sounds odd he must simply accept it and continue to listen, letting his mind catch on one phrase or another. And if he finds himself suddenly jolting back to attention after a minute or two of wondering whether he remembered to lock his apartment, or whether a crack in the ceiling looks more like a fried egg or France, or whether he should have a hamburger for dinner, he must accept that he has missed a bit of the poem, there is no retrieving it, and just enjoy what is left without worrying too much about how it all fits together.45

Unlike Pater’s idealism, Ashbery’s thinking about the reception of art invites the external ‘debris’ into life, into aesthetic experience as a constitutive part of that experience. This is discussed explicitly in Ashbery’s most famous work, ‘Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror’, a poem that simultaneously explores the context-text relations of its

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subject, Parmigianino’s Mannerist portrait, and those of the poet himself, as subject. Indeed, the line between text and context is constantly blurred by Ashbery, to the point that art itself is introduced as incidental debris in Ashbery’s intertextuality: ‘when I discovered [other poets] in my work,’ he has said, ‘I was happy to welcome them. It was nice that they dropped by’.46 Though the history of the work of art is often abstracted by Ashbery, the present-tense situation of its reception is always visibly present. It is here that Ashbery’s thinking about art as more than simply an aesthetic of taste emerges. It is not ‘meaning’ which preoccupies Ashbery, but rather the situation of writing. If we want to describe this in terms of J. L. Austin’s distinction between locutionary utterance (the sign with a definite reference) and illocutionary force (the speech-act reliant on its context), we can say that Ashbery’s interest lies in the context-text relation of the illocutionary force.47 We see this in ‘Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror’: The balloon pops, the attention Turns dully away. Clouds In the puddle stir up into sawtoothed fragments. I think of the friends Who came to see me, of what yesterday Was like. A peculiar slant Of memory that intrudes on the dreaming model In the silence of the studio as he considers Lifting the pencil to the self-portrait. How many people came and stayed a certain time, Uttered light or dark speech that became part of you Like light behind windblown fog and sand, Filtered and influenced by it, until no part Remains that is surely you. Those voices in the dusk Have told you all and still the tale goes on In the form of memories deposited in irregular Clumps of crystals. Whose curved hand controls, Francesco, the turning seasons and the thoughts That peel off and fly away at breathless speeds Like the last stubborn leaves ripped From wet branches? I see in this only the chaos Of your round mirror which organizes everything Around the polestar of your eyes which are empty, Know nothing, dream but reveal nothing. I feel the carousel starting slowly And going faster and faster: desk, papers, books, Photographs of friends, the window and the trees Merging in one neutral band that surrounds Me on all sides, everywhere I look.

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And I cannot explain the action of leveling, Why it should all boil down to one Uniform substance, a magma of interiors. (SP, 70–1)

Distinct from the ‘uniform substance’ of Pater or Hume, or the autonomous textual object of the New Criticism, the artwork here is clearly determined by a specific situation, and with a whole host of particulars and impeding phenomena. Ashbery’s interest in the situation, however, is not the historical contextualisation we might find in scholarly work, or in other, very different reader-poets like Charles Olson or Geoffrey Hill. The situation in Ashbery’s cultural context, like pleasure, represents something of an aesthetic taboo because it has nothing whatsoever to do with the text in question; here, Parmigianino’s painting is ousted by the ‘friends / Who came to see me, of what yesterday / Was like . . . until no part / Remains that is surely you’. Except that for Ashbery, since this is the situation from which he experiences the work, it has everything to do with it. The work of art for Ashbery can only occupy one site, by definition also many: ‘its room, our moment of attention’ (SP, 69).48 ‘I’m going to write / an hour, then read / what someone else has written,’ Ashbery says in a 1992 poem written shortly after he delivered the Norton lectures, only to point out that there is ‘no mansion for this to happen in’ (HL, 3). ‘Self-Portrait’ extends what is read to include ‘The shadow of the city’ and other diverse phenomena, as the poem progresses to meditate on wider questions of social life. This is all very different from Vendler’s Ashbery ‘leaving behind’ the ‘world of circumstances’. In the cases of the twentieth century’s most influential readers, Pound and Eliot, the aesthetic act of reading is marginalised; what is read in The Waste Land and The Cantos is a literature already crystallised into history. The priority of old over new is established in this history, as it has been in most forms of intertextuality since the early modern period’s use of classical authority. Eliot’s maxim, ‘Return to the Sources’, was a major motivating force behind the mainstream (or what the period’s burgeoning avant-garde invariably called ‘academic’) poetry of the 1950s, as typified by the figure of Robert Lowell.49 The historian of ideas, Quentin Skinner, has characterised such a conception of history as a ‘mythology of coherence’. Texts from the past are legitimised, argues Skinner, to the extent that they are unified within a predetermined narrative of history. The reader, that is, uncritically arrives at the work with ‘set’ ideas of what it should be, and how it must ‘contribute’ to a group of essential, transhistorical issues, judging texts by the extent to which they confirm the continuation of a certain preconception of history.50 Skinner’s ‘mythology’ alludes directly to Eliot’s historical sense, but also

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describes Pater’s blurring of historical periods into one ‘active principle’, and even Bloom’s epoch of ‘belatedness’.51 Ashbery enacts reading through writing, rather than using texts from the past as a preparation for poetry. Ashbery’s major intervention is to move the art of the past, through reading it, into the present. It is not, however, that Ashbery, like Eliot, does so in order to organise the past as a response to the present’s decayed manifestation of it. Michel Foucault’s concept of a ‘history of the present’ is a useful tool for thinking about Ashbery’s very different sense of the relation between past and present.52 The past for Foucault is something retroactively founded on the present, rather than a matter of first events evolving; history as a discipline should therefore be of rather than simply from the present. The writer’s function is to show up otherness, ‘the genesis of differences’ – to ‘show how that-which-is has not always been’.53 The point of viewing the past ‘not so much from history as from the present’ is that this very act, in its explicit presentation of a contemporary point of view on the past, gives us a ‘historical awareness of our present circumstance’.54 Ashbery’s cast of mind is constantly revealed in such terms, his reading of John Clare being one important example: ‘The effect of Clare’s poetry, on me at least, is always the same – that of re-inserting me in my present, of re-establishing “now” ’ (OT, 19). Foucault’s present is clearly differently conceived to Ashbery’s: Discipline and Punish reformulates its ‘archaeology’ in the politically pointed context of modern prison revolts and the contemporary subversion of penal assumptions. The structure of these presents is the same, however. Ashbery reads Eliotic Modernism as a species of Skinner’s mythology of coherence, or Foucault’s ‘thatwhich-has-always-been’, and attempts to oppose it so as to reorder the priorities of poetry’s reading of history. In his preoccupation with what now does to history, Ashbery seeks to disclose the present in its newness, as more than a fall from the past. Ashbery’s reading, as it appears in his poetry, is the medium for this disclosure. The meaning of ‘Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror’ is learned, in Foucault’s words, not so much from history as from the present, and Ashbery’s own presence is articulated in the medium of a reading of the past. The work of the past is viewed as present not because it is ‘relevant’ to our own time, but in so far as it reveals, by the very nature in which we respond to it, something about the present moment in which this response takes place. The idea of a ‘history of the present’ is a reversal, then, of the traditional idea of historical evolution; rather than the past enforcing its will on the present, the present represents, and in doing so is represented by, the past. Ashbery, unlike Eliot, Pater and Bloom, is not interested in constructing a timeless canon of works because his sense of reading is founded on the

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centrality of a reading situation. This is a distinctive feature of Ashbery’s poetics in relation to his contemporaries as well, and goes some way to accounting for his own influence. That the influence of the Eliotic historical sense was not confined to the 1950s is clear from characterisations of late-twentieth-century forms: if postmodernism is, as Fredric Jameson claims, about ‘the imprisonment in the past’ in which ‘all that is left is to imitate dead styles, to speak through the masks’, then Ashbery is, ironically, an anomaly within its own cultural moment.55 If Ashbery’s style of reading is to be distinguished from the prioritisation of the past, his sense of ‘presence’ is also very different from the ‘situation’ of Abstract Expressionism’s ‘tradition of the new’, to which Ashbery’s work has too often been compared. Harold Rosenberg said that ‘each situation has its own exclusive key’ for Abstract Expressionist art, and is ‘the result of a specific encounter’.56 Abstract Expressionism’s conception of the situation, with its emphasis on the primal event, is based on an assumption that Ashbery would not allow. This assumption is that the work takes place, is made, in the present: that the final work of art is simultaneous with its situation of making (hence the dead bees and broken glass, the accidents, the rhythmic painterly style of Pollock’s canvases). Because of its roots in certain kinds of surrealism and primitivism, situations in Abstract Expressionism are always ahistorical, occasions of the psyche rather than of society. ‘I am nature,’ remarked Pollock. Rosenberg’s ‘specific encounter’, being ‘exclusive’, can find no ‘conventional’ (to use Austin’s term) ground on which to be communicated. Indeed, for Rosenberg, this is the very source of Abstract Expressionism’s dramatic power. Ashbery’s reading is conventional in a strict sense that allows its unconventionality to emerge in a coherent and meaningful way. To put this another way, we can once again look to Skinner, who describes the present’s necessary description of ‘the unfamiliar in terms of the familiar’.57 That is, while acknowledging that there is an unfamiliar, or something new, Skinner describes how this is initially communicated through the medium of the past. It is possible to have a series of active relations between present author and past text in which the two are ultimately different. In engaging in such a procedure, Ashbery constructs an aesthetic that, unlike Eliot’s nothing-new-underthe-sun conservativism, is able to add something extra to the art of the past, through the very medium of reading it.58 This is what I will call Ashbery’s aesthetic of inattention. * * * There are two questions arising here: what are Ashbery’s ‘present circumstances’, and how exactly are they disclosed in his poetry? The first

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of these will be the subject of each chapter in this book, but it cannot be underestimated as a task. Ashbery’s ‘history of the present’ is what makes critical interventions like Stephen Paul Miller’s ambitious project to read Ashbery as a documentary writer, or David Herd’s to read him as an occasional poet, so important.59 Like Miller and Herd, who read Ashbery’s major work as a series of engagements with Vietnam, the Watergate scandal and the Iran-Contra affair with a directness that only seems exaggerated, I will describe Ashbery’s reading as essentially responsive. Though Ashbery is nothing if not a poet of abstraction, and though Ashbery’s sense of his present is more epistemological than political, there is nevertheless a way of charting his reading in parallel with its changing concrete situations. To sketch this narrative here can only be reductive, but some critical moments can be outlined: the reading of the Metaphysical poets coming out the New Critical climate of Ashbery’s time at Harvard and the ‘tranquilized Fifties’; the engagement with Eliot out of Ashbery’s exile in Paris in the late 1950s and early 1960s; of Wordsworth as a response to the emergence of Reaganism; and the late Ashbery’s reading of himself as a reaction to the latter’s perceived victory as an ideology. Ashbery’s ‘readerly career’ is not simply a matter of Ashbery substituting certain poets for others in the face of changing socio-political circumstances, however, but of a constantly developing sense of reading itself, manifested in changing engagements with poets, and engagements with changing poets. The key question first, though, is how exactly does Ashbery go about writing his ‘history of the present’? Which is to ask, how does Ashbery’s poetry get written out of his reading? The answer, I think, is in Ashbery’s poetics of inattention. If there is something distinctly American about Ashbery’s work, it is found in pragmatism rather than mysticism. John Dewey’s suggestion that we speak of aesthetic experience not simply as experience but ‘an experience’ is suggestive here. Dewey writes of ‘recovering the continuity of aesthetic experience with the normal processes of living’ in his monumental Art as Experience (1934).60 What this means for my purposes is characterised by William James’s tiny but wonderful discussion of ‘Inattention’ in Principles of Psychology: We do not notice the ticking of the clock, the noise of the city streets, or the roaring of the brook near the house; and even the din of a foundry or factory will not mingle with the thoughts of its workers, if they have been there long enough . . . The pressure of our clothes and shoes, the beating of our hearts and arteries, our breathing, certain steadfast bodily pains, habitual odors, tastes in the mouth, etc., are examples from other senses, of the same lapse into unconsciousness of any too unchanging content.61

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James’s contention is that inattention is always going on. James also, however, has a moral point: the unattended phenomena, he says, ‘have formed connections in the mind which it is now difficult to break; they are constituents of processes which it is hard to arrest’.62 The implications of James’s thought would seem to be clear for avant-garde art: its role is to attend to what goes unnoticed in life, to transform and ‘trace’, by a kind of ostranenie, what we have left unattended. Such attention is, indeed, something Perloff attributes to Frank O’Hara in her booklength study of the poet, speaking of the ‘defamiliarisation’ inherent in his ‘aesthetic of attention’.63 Ashbery’s work, as I have been suggesting, operates along similar lines. Why not simply call this an aesthetic of attention, then?64 One of Ashbery’s first masterpieces, ‘The Picture of Little J. A. in a Prospect of Flowers’ (ST, 27–9), is a short, densely populated poem that can be seen as setting out an answer to this question. Written in 1950, the work is of a piece with many similar New York experiments in the ‘list-of-books poem’, such as O’Hara’s famous ‘Memorial Day 1950’, or Ashbery’s own absurdist intertextual collaboration with Kenneth Koch, ‘The Inferno’.65 ‘Little J. A.’ can be set apart from these works, however, in that Ashbery goes beyond his peers’ self-definition through cataloguing to make a statement about how such self-definition is constituted – that is, how reading itself happens, and how a poet can faithfully manifest it in his poetry. The poem is one of Ashbery’s earliest ‘allegories of reading’, to use Paul de Man’s phrase – a poem which discloses itself as it tells the story of its reading. Here is its opening: He was spoilt from childhood by the future, which he mastered rather early and apparently without great difficulty. BORIS PASTERNAK I Darkness falls like a wet sponge And Dick gives Genevieve a swift punch In the pajamas. “Aroint thee, witch.” Her tongue from previous ecstasy Releases thoughts like little hats. “He clap’d me first during the eclipse. Afterwards I noted his manner Much altered. But he sending At that time certain handsome jewels I durst not seem to take offence.” (ST, 27)

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As a Bildungsroman of sorts, Ashbery’s poem describes its genesis through the work of other writers. Referencing Andrew Marvell’s poem of a similar title at its outset, ‘Little J. A.’ loses track of its source, referring within half a dozen lines to figures as divergent as Marvell and Boris Pasternak, James Joyce, Thomas Nashe, Daniel Defoe, Shakespeare and Wordsworth. The poem’s inclusiveness was not lost on James Schuyler, who later recalled a conversation about Joyce with Ashbery: ‘I / didn’t know you were allowed not to like James / Joyce. The book I suppose is a masterpiece: freedom of / choice is better. Thank you, “Little J. A. in a / Prospect of Flowers”.’66 The poem appears to absorb its references like the wet sponge of its first line. Absorption, though, would be a mistaken reading of the poem’s method, for ‘Little J. A.’ works as much by a principle of displacement as accumulation. Just as the theme of the poem is ‘lost words’ (ST, 29), or the slippage of signification in the passage of time, so the voices here enter and exit by a logic of distraction, dislodging each other rather than coming together to build an argument. Unlike O’Hara, whose allusions are so much further documentation on rapidly changing reality, Ashbery’s is a method of contingency, ironically written from a static physical state. Where O’Hara’s poetry accumulates what his attention discovers, Ashbery’s ruminating memorial of his youth is an expression of the temporal pressures, distractions and displacements inherent in reading. The result is that there is nothing to be called attention here at all. One can hardly be said to ‘notice’ the contingent workings of the mind; no object is being defamiliarised in ‘Little J. A.’, for there are no objects, and there is nothing familiar. If one does so at all, one attends to inattention itself. Both Ashbery’s motivation behind reading the poets he does, and conversely their effect on his own inattentive poetics, are that they propose similar forms of attention. It is notable that Ashbery finds quite different resources in some of the American writers important to him, such as Emerson and Stevens, whom we may describe as the more ambitious and disciplined counterweights to Ashbery’s diffuse and generous inattention. We certainly cannot characterise ‘the English tradition’ as inattentive, but Ashbery more than often reads the minor poets he does as a way to escape the English Canon. John Clare is one such antidote, and another allegory of reading, Ashbery’s 1970 prose poem, ‘For John Clare’, presents an inattentive reading of Clare in both its form and content: Kind of empty in the way it sees everything, the earth gets to its feet and salutes the sky. More of a success at it this time than most others it is. The feeling that the sky might be in the back of someone’s mind. Then there is no telling how many there are. They grace everything – bush and tree – to take

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the roisterer’s mind off his caroling – so it’s like a smooth switch back. To what was aired in their previous conniption fit. There is so much to be seen everywhere that it’s like not getting used to it, only there is so much it never feels new, never any different. You are standing looking at that building and you cannot take it all in, certain details are already hazy and the mind boggles. What will it all be like in five years’ time when you try to remember? Will there have been boards in between the grass part and the edge of the street? (DDS, 35)

In line with Skinner’s suggestion that the new is conceived of in terms of the old, the rhetoric of immediacy here is Clare’s, while the language, style and subject matter are not. Ashbery talks of Clare as ‘re-inserting me in my present’, and the specific presentness of Clare comes simultaneously out of and in contrast to the poet. Ashbery rightly reads inattention into Clare, whose descriptive poetry, as I will outline later, is essentially descriptive of description itself: how the mind, in the face of ‘so much to be seen’, finds it ‘cannot take it all in, certain details are already hazy and the mind boggles’. While speaking of these characteristics of Clare’s work, Ashbery’s poem imitates the rhetoric Clare uses in their expression; the fragmented syntax of subordinate clauses here is an inversion of Clare’s unpunctuated style, but also a continuation of its deviant immediacy, while the poem’s colloquialisms are obviously American, though inspired by Clare’s own pioneering use of dialect and conversational presence (‘Here is Clare on his rounds again, telling us what he has just seen,’ Ashbery comments elsewhere [OT, 33]). Ashbery’s work of the late 1960s and early 1970s is especially close to Clare, and it is not surprising to see Ashbery’s inattention figure itself in terms of the nineteenth-century peasant poet. The poems of SelfPortrait in a Convex Mirror and Houseboat Days, in a way that perhaps explains their success as volumes, go more confidently on their own steam, and here we can see Ashbery’s inattentive poetics working, as it were, independently. ‘Mixed Feelings’, from Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, enacts fully that of which ‘For John Clare’ speaks. Musing on some ‘girls lounging around / An old fighter bomber, circa 1942’ in an old photograph, amid the ‘pleasant smell of frying sausages’ and other things which ‘attack the sense’, the poet imagines the impossibility of describing the changed ‘fabric of our society’ (42). He then pictures meeting these ‘Ruths, Lindas, Pats and Sheilas’ in our new, confusing world: I wonder How they got that way, but am not going to Waste any more time thinking about them.

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I have already forgotten them Until some day in the not too distant future When we meet possibly in the lounge of a modern airport, They looking as astonishingly young and fresh as when the picture was made But full of contradictory ideas, stupid ones as well as Worthwhile ones, but all flooding the surface of our minds As we babble about the sky and the weather and the forests of change. (43)

The fact that the poet only imagines this scene as a result of distraction is what makes this climactic anti-climax to the poem: in trying not to think of ‘them’, he is inevitably drawn to doing so. The syntax builds us up for a series of resolutions (‘until some day x, then x’, ‘when we meet, x happens’), but we are left with nothing but the ‘contradictory ideas’ of the world that the girls are part of – ‘stupid ones as well as / Worthwhile ones, but all flooding the surface of our minds’. We end with ‘babble about the sky’ rather than a conclusive refocusing of reality. What was once a subject of inattention is not now attended to or delineated, but is rather brought to light on its own terms, at what the poem calls ‘the extreme point of legibility’ (42). Rather than wakening a slumbering inattentive, Ashbery embraces it, foregrounds it, making inattention itself the subject of his work. He explains such a procedure in an art review of 1986: [L]esser artists correct nature in a misguided attempt at heightened realism, forgetting that the real is not only what one sees but also a result of how one sees it – inattentively, inaccurately perhaps, but nevertheless that is how it is coming through to us, and to deny this is to deny the life of the picture. (RS, 242)

Inattention, however inelegant its ‘babble about the sky’, is the very paradigm of the real for Ashbery. Revealingly, such stress on remembering how the art we view is ‘coming through to us’, however ‘inattentively’ perceived, is reflected in Ashbery’s comments on the function of his own poetry: You’re surrounded by different elements of a work and it doesn’t really matter whether you’re focussing on one of them or none of them at any particular moment, but you’re getting a kind of indirect refraction from the situation that you’re in . . . it will be doing its job if its audience is intermittently aware of it while thinking about other things at the same time.67

The audience, or more simply the reader, brings us full circle. Ashbery’s account of his ideal, inattentive reader is, it turns out, a description of himself as a reader. In his 1989 to 1990 Charles Eliot Norton Lectures

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at Harvard, Ashbery notes: ‘the ideal situation for the poet is to have the reader speak the poem, and how nice it would be for everybody if that could be the case.’68 It is this parallelism of Ashbery reading and us reading Ashbery, of the two situations being mirrored, that is of primary interest for the poet. To quote John Dewey again: to perceive, a beholder must create his own experience. And his creation must include relations comparable to those which the original producer underwent. They are not the same in any literal sense. But with the perceiver, as with the artist, there must be an ordering of the elements of the whole that is in form, although not in details, the same as the process of organization the creator of the work consciously experienced.69

Ashbery, to adapt Dewey’s idea, makes poetry from a position of the beholder; the poet’s ‘creation’ is to read the past, and present this reading as poem. Ashbery’s directives of how to read his work, in which the reader ‘must accept that he has missed a bit of the poem, there is no retrieving it, and just enjoy what is left without worrying too much about how it all fits together’, derive from his own inattentive reading practices, as described by Larissa MacFarquhar: When [Ashbery] sits down with a book of poems by somebody else he goes through it quickly. He forms a first impression of a poem almost at once, and if he isn’t grabbed by it he’ll flip ahead and read something else. But if he is caught up he’ll keep going, still reading quite fast, not making any attempt to understand what’s going on but feeling that on some other level something is clicking between him and the poem, something is working.70

The ‘one-size-fits-all’ figure, used by Ashbery to describe his mostanthologised poem, ‘Soonest Mended’, has a specific meaning here as a resistance to ideas of the author as authority. Ashbery’s poetry situates the author as one who reads; the poet, therefore, moves into a position analogous with the reader of his own poems. In this sense, the reading of past poetry, and the reception of art in general, is a profound determinant of his writing. Ashbery, releasing the past into the dynamics of the contemporary, invites the reader into the poem, as an equal. * * * Inattention accounts not just for Ashbery’s history of the present, but for a number of other features of his work as I will outline them. It should be said that discussing Ashbery alongside the poets included in this book provides us with a useful and original vocabulary with which to describe the distinctive features of Ashbery’s work generally. In accordance with the problems raised by this introduction, vague critical

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commonplaces about Ashbery’s poetry of process, his solipsistic concerns with consciousness, his perceived surrealism, can all be qualified, elaborated or repudiated by investigating how Ashbery understands these issues through reading. These investigations will take the form of an examination of the devices Ashbery arrives at through his engagement with each poet. Paradox, then, is discussed primarily in terms of Ashbery’s reading of metaphor and conceit in Marvell and Donne; the problems inherent in Ashbery’s temporal mimeticism are addressed in a discussion of Clarean description and narrative in Chapter 2; agency, solipsism and politics come to the fore in Chapter 3 within a consideration of Wordsworth and symbol; Chapter 4 considers some of the permissive aspects of Ashbery’s reading by surveying his allusive strategies alongside those of Eliot; while authority and address are explored in a discussion of Auden’s effect on Ashbery’s style.71 The poets collected here tell us things about Ashbery’s development, and provide terms helpful for explaining some of the key turns in Ashbery’s career: reconstructing Ashbery’s reading of Eliot, for example, throws light on his retreat from the radical experimentalism of The Tennis Court Oath (1962); while a reading of Clare and Wordsworth can suggest the changing relationship with Romanticism Ashbery develops in the 1970s and 1980s. Such poets can also, importantly, account for the variety of Ashbery’s registers in ways that other characterisations of Ashbery are less able. Ashbery treats texts as resources rather than sources, and it is worth emphasising that, in this book’s presentation of these English poets, it is Ashbery’s version that is put forward. Where Ashbery’s interpretation is idiosyncratic or unconventional, which is for the most part, this is pointed out. It is not, however, my purpose to present two poets and draw parallels, but rather to see the English poets of the past through the eyes of the living American one. The chapters that follow, therefore, though they march chronologically in terms of the English poets concerned, reflect an argument circular in structure. That is, I view Ashbery’s readings of Metaphysical poetry, Clare and Wordsworth as representative of core aspects of his early, middle and late work respectively. The study then comes full circle to analyse the two relationships that develop and reposition these initial discussions: an account of Ashbery’s engagement with Eliot, and a final, career-spanning survey of his reading of Auden. Ashbery is now the first living poet to have published a Collected Poems, or at least the first half of one, under the imprint of the Library of America; a Selected Later Poems is now available; and it seems increasingly that Ashbery’s poetry is inviting final judgements. I suggest

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that this judgement should base itself on reading, the central aspect of Ashbery’s career, and the aspect that makes Ashbery central.

Notes 1. Piotr Sommer, ‘John Ashbery in Warsaw’, p. 15. The phrase, ‘something we have that they don’t’, is in fact used as the title of a collection of essays on UK–US poetic relationships; see Mark Ford and Steve Clark (eds), Something We Have That They Don’t: British and American Poetic Relations Since 1925. 2. Harold Bloom, Figures of Capable Imagination, pp. 130, 206. 3. Susan Schultz, The Tribe of John: Ashbery and Contemporary Poetry, p. 1. 4. Helen Vendler, The Music of What Happens: Poems, Poets, Critics, pp. 225, 257. 5. See Marjorie Perloff, The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage, pp. 8–28, and Perloff, ‘Normalizing John Ashbery’. 6. Alfred Corn, ‘A Magma of Interiors’, p. 85. 7. Mark Ford, John Ashbery in Conversation with Mark Ford, p. 53. 8. Sommer, ‘John Ashbery in Warsaw’, p. 15. 9. David Herd, ‘John Ashbery “In Conversation” ’, p. 36. 10. Ashbery says he has ‘a fascination with all great English poetry of the past which I think almost any American poet has’ (Ford, John Ashbery in Conversation with Mark Ford, p. 53). 11. Letter to John Ash, 12 March 1984, AM-6 (23), Houghton Library, Harvard University. 12. See Donald Allen (ed.), The New American Poetry. 13. Ashbery’s tastes in fiction raise a suspicion that he is just as interested in English manners as he is in English literature – a list would include Elizabeth Bowen, Henry Green, Ronald Firbank, Ivy-Compton Burnett and Mary Webb. 14. Vendler, The Harvard Book of Contemporary American Poetry, pp. 1, 9, 13. 15. Mark Ford, for example, has demonstrated the importance of French poetry to Ashbery (see ‘Mont d’Espoir or Mount Despair: Early Bishop, Early Ashbery, and the French’); David Herd has given the breadth and content of Ashbery’s reading its proper importance in John Ashbery and American Poetry, as has John Shoptaw’s authoritative study of Ashbery, On the Outside Looking Out; Geoff Ward’s Statutes of Liberty: The New York School of Poets has discussed Ashbery’s relationship with the underdiscussed writers of the Ashbery canon like Auden and Henry James; while Angus Fletcher’s A New Theory for American Poetry has begun to suggest the centrality of Clare to Ashbery’s work. 16. Bloom, for instance, christens Ashbery ‘most legitimate of the sons of Stevens’ (A Map of Misreading, p. 205), whom he in turn calls ‘the American Wordsworth’ (Figures of Capable Imagination, p. 135). A sample of the many discussions of Ashbery’s debt to Stevens should include: Harold Bloom, ‘Apophrades or the Return of the Dead’, in The Anxiety of Influence; Lynn Keller, ‘ “Thinkers Without Final Thoughts”:

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17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

John Ashbery and English Poetry John Ashbery’s Evolving Debt to Wallace Stevens’; David Shapiro, John Ashbery: An Introduction to the Poetry; Charles Berger, Forms of Farewell: The Late Poetry of Wallace Stevens, pp. 187–8; John Irwin, ‘The Reader is the Medium: Ashbery and Ammons Ensphered’. Bloom, Figures of Capable Imagination, pp. 135, 189, 196. Vendler, The Music of What Happens: Poems, Poets, Critics, p. 225. Ibid., p. 232. Bloom, Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism, p. 14. Bloom, Figures of Capable Imagination, pp. 130–1. As Vendler does: ‘the endless beginnings in Ashbery, the changes of scenery, the shifting of characters . . . ally him to our most volatile poets – the Shakespeare of the sonnets, the Herbert of “The Temple”, the Keats of the letters, the Shelley of “Epipsychidion” ’ (The Music of What Happens: Poems, Poets, Critics, p. 235). Perloff, The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage, p. 11. Bloom, A Map of Misreading, p. 165. Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, p. 11. Julia Kristeva, ‘The Bounded Text’, in Desire in Language, p. 66. Roland Barthes, ‘Work to Text’, in The Rustle of Language, p. 59. Barthes, ‘Death of the Author’, in The Rustle of Language, p. 54. Barthes, ‘Work to Text’, in The Rustle of Language, p. 60. Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class?, p. 158. Fish, ‘Literature in the Reader: Affective Stylistics’, pp. 126–7. His italics. Fish, Is There a Text in This Class?, p. 152. See also Iser, ‘The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach’. Mark Silverberg, The New York School Poets and the Neo-avant-garde: Between Radical Art and Radical Chic, p. 139. Ben Hickman, ‘Out of the Ferment’, p. 82. Letter dated 8 August 1950, MS Am 2072 (I:2), Houghton Library, Harvard University. Hickman, ‘Out of the Ferment’. Stein is actually speaking of her own work, and her exact words are, ‘If you enjoy it you understand it,’ which she says in a 1934 radio interview. Bloom, John Ashbery, p. 6; Theodor Adorno, ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’, p. 34. Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, p. xxix. Ibid., pp. xxx–xxxi. Ibid, p. 146. David Hume, ‘Of the Standard of Taste’, p. 596. Ibid., p. 597. My emphasis. Cited in Herd, John Ashbery and American Poetry, p. 7. Unpublished interview with the author, May 2008. Larissa MacFarquhar, ‘Present Waking Life: Becoming John Ashbery’, p. 97. (Note that MacFarquhar is paraphrasing Ashbery here.) Cited in Aidan Wasley, ‘The Gay Apprentice: Ashbery, Auden, and the Portrait of the Artist as Young Critic’, p. 691. See J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, pp. 94–147. It is this kind of ‘room’ that is captured on the cover of Ashbery’s 1985 Selected Poems in a painting by Larry Rivers: the text of Ashbery’s 1976

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Introduction

49. 50. 51.

52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58.

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poem ‘Pyrography’ floats in the background to a portrait of Ashbery, who sits at his typewriter in a comfortable chair in his apartment living room, with slippers on and books scattered around. T. S Eliot, ‘War-Paint and Feathers’, p. 1036. Lowell’s early poem, ‘A Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket’, is perhaps the most famous and exaggerated example of this desire to ‘return’ to origin. See Quentin Skinner, Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and his Critics, pp. 39–56. I include Bloom’s theory of ‘Agon’ or poetic struggle in this judgement, as it is, in the subtitle of that book, ‘a theory of revisionism’ – that is, a theory in which the past text has the originary priority. See Bloom, Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, pp. 30–1. Foucault, The Order of Things, p. 157; and Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, p. 209. Ibid., p. 206. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, p. 115. Harold Rosenberg, Tradition of the New, p. 19. Skinner, Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and his Critics, p. 31. Ashbery, in fact, offers us a way to reverse the seemingly unmovable prejudice modern culture has had regarding how tradition works. The art critic Michael Baxandall’s appealing diagnosis of the ‘curse’ of influence is challenged in a fresh and robust way by Ashbery that could have applications beyond conceptions of poetic intertextuality: ‘Influence’ is a curse of art criticism primarily because of its wrongheaded grammatical prejudice about who is the agent and who the patient: it seems to reverse the active / passive relation which the historical actor experiences and the inferential beholder will wish to take into account. If one says that X influenced Y it does seem that one is saying that X did something to Y rather than Y did something to X . . . If we think of Y rather than X as the agent, the vocabulary is much richer and more attractively diversified: draw on, resort to, avail oneself of, appropriate from, have recourse to, adapt, misunderstand, refer to, pick up, take on, engage with, react to, quote, differentiate oneself from, assimilate oneself to, assimilate, align oneself with, copy, address, paraphrase, absorb, make a variation on, revive, continue, remodel, ape, emulate, travesty, parody, extract from, distort, attend to . . . Most of these relations just cannot be stated the other way round. (Baxandall, Patterns of Intention, pp. 58–9)

59. See Stephen Paul Miller, The Seventies Now: Culture as Surveillance, pp. 130–217; and David Herd, John Ashbery and American Poetry, pp. 1–25. 60. John Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 10. 61. William James, The Principles of Psychology, p. 455. 62. Ibid., p. 456. 63. See Perloff, Frank O’Hara: Poet Among Painters, pp. 1–30. 64. The one work that has dealt with this issue is Andrew DuBois’s Ashbery’s Forms of Attention. Unfortunately, though, this study sends Ashbery back

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65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

John Ashbery and English Poetry to orthodox Surrealism in its psychologising of the issue and evasion of specifically textual questions, reading Ashberyan attention as it does in relation to issues at best peripheral to Ashbery, like therapy and senility. ‘The Inferno’ is published in Locus Solus II, p. 162. James Schuyler, Collected Poems, pp. 286–7. MacFarquhar, ‘Present Waking Life’, p. 98. John Ashbery, recording of ‘Schubert’s Unfinished’, Lamont Library, Harvard University. Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 54. MacFarquhar, ‘Present Waking Life’, p. 97. The inclusion of both Eliot and Auden in a study of Ashbery and English poetry does not, perhaps, require any justification, though it should be pointed out that the Auden surveyed here is ‘The English Auden’, and that Eliot is considered, on his own terms, as a poet operating in England, and centrally within the English tradition.

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Chapter One

Lost words: Donne, Marvell and Ashberyan metaphor

At Harvard in the late 1940s, despite studying ‘the usual curriculum’, which at the time amounted to the entire English Canon, Ashbery recalls that it was Metaphysical poets like John Donne, Andrew Marvell and Henry Vaughan that he was ‘particularly attracted to’.1 The evidence of this in Ashbery’s earliest poems is clear enough. Many of these, mostly published in the Harvard Advocate, but some dating from Ashbery’s teenage years at Deerfield Academy, are straightforward imitations of the lyrics of Donne and his followers. These Metaphysical poems, making cosmic speculations in the medium of the extended metaphor, constitute the bulk of Ashbery’s juvenilia, as even the small selection of uncollected early work in Ashbery’s Collected Poems shows. That Ashbery was thus influenced is hardly surprising: the likes of Donne, Marvell and Vaughan, after T. S. Eliot’s efforts in the 1920s and 1930s, were among the most prevalent literary materials in post-war American poetry, influencing almost everyone from Robert Lowell to Allen Ginsberg.2 Academically, the Metaphysicals were truly in fashion; Donne, for example, was on three different courses for Ashbery’s Harvard degree, and while most areas of the Canon had to be condensed under large headings like ‘Sixteenth-Century Poetry’ or ‘NineteenthCentury Fiction’, ‘Donne and his School’ had a course of their own (or, more accurately, two – Ashbery having already taken English 130b, ‘Metaphysical Poets: Donne to Marvell’ in his junior year). New Critics like Cleanth Brooks, along with Eliot, were required reading. Emerging from three centuries outside the literary establishment, the strain of seventeenth-century verse loosely termed ‘Metaphysical’ was, by the time Ashbery was developing a poetic voice, an epochal artistic tendency rivalling the Augustan and Romantic in importance. Ashbery and his contemporaries already had an influential example of how to write verse out of Metaphysical poetry in the form of the Middle Generation’s work. The 1940s and 1950s read Donne and his school

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as essentially ‘sensible’ poets, a continuation of the function Eliot had attributed to the Metaphysicals in his narrative of ‘unified sensibility’. W. D. Snodgrass, whose first collection, Heart’s Needle, would become a canonical text of Middle Generation verse, recollects his reception of the poets: we had been taught to write a very difficult and very intellectual poem. We tried to achieve the obscure and dense texture of the French Symbolists . . . but by using methods similar to those of the very intellectual and conscious poets of the English Renaissance, especially the Metaphysical poets.3

By ‘methods’ here, Snodgrass refers to the formal. ‘Returning’, in John Berryman’s words, ‘to the deliberate and the formal’, Middle Generation poetry reads Metaphysical poetry as a set of technical devices allowing for the same kind of lyric closure to be found in seventeenth-century metrics, with which such techniques were often used in conjunction.4 That such a reading of poetry was labelled ‘academic’ by figures associated with the New American Poetry was unsurprising, given that, most of the time, the poets described their sense of tradition in consciously academic language. Berryman, for example, applied the terms of I. A. Richards’s New Critical description of metaphor as a two-sided dynamic of ‘target’ meaning and image ‘vehicle’ to explain his use of Metaphysical metrics and metaphor in his Homage to Mistress Bradstreet. ‘The eight-line stanza I invented here after a lifetime’s study, especially of Yeats’s, and in particular the one adopted from Abraham Cowley for his elegy “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory”,’ says Berryman. ‘For four-and-a-half years, then, I accumulated materials and sketched, fleshing out the target or vehicle.’5 In the most immediate sense, the New York School’s response to this dry reading of the poets it admired was to reintroduce anarchic and disparate source material, whose use Metaphysical poetry had pioneered, mining science, geometry, astronomy and conflicting theologies for its metaphors. Ashbery’s poems about Daffy Duck, sixteenth-century Mannerist painters, Popeye, or the ancient art of making decisions based on a passage from Virgil selected at random, are as much part of such a response as Bill Berkson’s ‘pools of smoke that smell ridiculously like someone’s raised eyebrow in a cyclone’, and other outrageous similes from the New York School.6 Ashbery’s deeper and more sustained engagement with Metaphysical poetry goes far beyond choices of unusual subject matter, however. Even Ashbery’s earliest reading of Metaphysical verse lays an emphasis firmly on the art of correspondence itself. The principal imitations in Ashbery’s juvenile poems are of the

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Metaphysical conceit – of complex, extended and paradoxical metaphor. This 1947 piece, ‘Undergraduate Stanzas’, is one such example: Love’s ideal kingdom has but room for one Though big in time as earth is far from sun. Fenced out from two, eternity’s borders may Be circumscribed by one in half a day. Trees once erect now droop; the sick façade Of autumn fronts the dusty boulevard. Shrubs quaintly bloom and burn; it is God’s will. But God describes an arc while love stands still. Love’s law goes round as dumb as rock in space. Our static love still wears an April face But marks its fixity, as through a mask The imp of God speaks, granting what we asked.7

The lyric takes its lead from the elaborate geometric figures of Andrew Marvell’s ‘The Definition of Love’, or those of Donne’s ‘A Valediction Forbidding Mourning’, proceeding through a complex arrangement of borders, orbits and anchors to represent the structure of love’s presumed infinitude. Another poem of Ashbery’s youth, called ‘A Sermon’, likewise makes paradoxical metaphor the centre of its argument: Move as water: soon gone Lightly girdling the dry stone. Touch nothing long: involved Nothing ever. Your fate and history Meet in geometry And in radiant law dissolve.8

It is no accident that Frank O’Hara’s description of Ashbery ‘always marrying the whole world’ should echo Samuel Johnson’s famous objection to Metaphysical poetry as an art in which ‘the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together’.9 As one of Ashbery’s undergraduate essays evidences, it is features like the ‘method of connotation’, ‘avoidance of genuine imagery’ and use of what he calls ‘parallel simile’ that first catch his eye in Metaphysical poetry.10 Such observations would be echoed when Auden described Ashbery’s own ‘strange juxtapositions of imagery’ in his 1956 preface to Some Trees.11 A distinctive use of metaphor, that is, is what ‘attracts’ Ashbery to the Metaphysicals, and analysing his reading of what we will broadly, if unfashionably, call Metaphysical conceit, can help us describe Ashbery’s own conception of metaphor. * * *

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Mid-twentieth-century accounts of Metaphysical conceit tell a story of ornamental Elizabethan metaphor giving way, due to a revived postElizabethan interest in rhetoric, to a full-blown ‘poetic of correspondences’, in one critic’s words, where metaphor is freed from its traditional function as ornament, to enact directly the resemblances in the world.12 Metaphor, according to this history, is transformed from an optional beautification of ideas into a major function of argumentation itself. The Metaphysical conceit, therefore, has traditionally been considered a tool of rhetoric, and its poets have largely been described as argumentative poets. Rosemond Tuve’s Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery describes the conceit as the ‘extended pursuit of a likeness by basing it on several logical parallels’; Helen Gardner, meanwhile, argues in an influential essay that the conceit is ‘used to persuade, or to define, or to prove a point’.13 A pressure to see the work of Donne and his contemporaries, following Eliot, as hard-headed cerebral poets of ‘sensibility’ means there is a similar tendency among New Critics to explain the contradictory and anarchic elements of Metaphysical poetry away. Cleanth Brooks’s 1947 The Well-Wrought Urn, the New Critical handbook of Ashbery’s time at Harvard, claimed to champion poetic paradox as William Empson’s famous study had ambiguity in 1930. ‘The language of poetry is the language of paradox,’ according to Brooks.14 Though such a language would appear to repudiate notions of an argumentative Metaphysical poetry, it ends up making such verse even more logical. Brooks’s paradox, it turns out, is simply a ‘logic of poetry’, and therefore another form of New Critical closure. It is used, according to Brooks, ‘to gain a compression and a precision’, and may even be considered ‘rational rather than divinely irrational’.15 Paradox is, in Brooks’s thesis, an exacting device to a poem or figure. Therefore, speaking of the paradoxical conclusion of Donne’s ‘The Canonisation’, he suggests that ‘the poet has actually built before our eyes within the song the “pretty room” with which he says the lovers can be content. The poem itself is the wellwrought urn which can hold the lovers’ ashes.’16 Eliot’s influence on such an interpretation is clear; his own description of the Metaphysical method as the ‘telescoping of images and multiple and multiplied associations’ into a single argument, evinces a similar desire to restrain the connotations of Metaphysical correspondence.17 It is not my purpose to decide on the veracity of these readings. What is clear, though, is that critical constructions of an argumentative Metaphysical poetry are not echoed in Ashbery’s interpretations of Donne and his contemporaries. What Ashbery terms the Metaphysical ‘avoidance of genuine imagery’ as an undergraduate, by which I take him to mean imagery in the scholastic senses outlined above, is identifi-

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able in the work of the Metaphysicals. Donne’s ‘The Paradox’ seems exemplary in this respect: I cannot say I loved, for who can say He was killed yesterday? Love with excess of heat, more young than old, Death kills with too much cold; We die but once, and who love last did die, He that saith twice, doth lie: ... Once I loved and died; and am now become Mine epitaph and tomb. Here dead men speak their last, and so do I; Love slain, lo, here I lie.18

Here, in a love poem exploiting the liar paradox by its punning ending (‘Love slain, lo, here I lie’), Donne entirely inverts the elaborate and only apparently argumentative conceits of the rest of the poem. The self-destructive poem seems, indeed, to be the antithesis of argument, culminating only, by its circular and impossible paradox, in endless contradiction. Locus Solus, the magazine Ashbery had edited with other New York poets in the early 1960s, approvingly noted this tendency when, in commentary to a verse letter from John Donne to Henry Goodyere, it referred to the work’s ‘joke at the end which destroys with a quip the whole poem’s purpose and masks this as hyperbole’.19 A similar situation holds in Marvell’s more serious ‘Dialogue Between the Soul and Body’, where any argument is impossible to pin down, as the poem’s ending shows: Soul.

What magic could me thus confine Within another’s grief to pine? Where, whatsoever it complain, I feel, that cannot feel, the pain; And all my care itself employs, That to preserve which me destroys; Constrained not only to endure Diseases, but, what’s worse, the cure; And, ready oft the port to gain, Am shipwrecked into health again.

Body. But Physic yet could never reach The maladies thou me dost teach; Whom first the cramp of hope does tear, And then the palsy shakes of fear; The pestilence of love does heat, Or hatred’s hidden ulcer eat; Joy’s cheerful madness does perplex,

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John Ashbery and English Poetry Or sorrow’s other madness vex; Which knowledge forces me to know, And memory will not forego; What but a soul could have the wit To build me up for sin so fit? So architects do square and hew Green trees that in the forest grew.20

Though the argument is ostensibly along dialectic lines, it progresses only into further quandaries about the inextricable nature of its two elements. Questions and logical constructions abound, but the conversation is ultimately a collection of invective, paradoxical conceits, in which each element enacts the drama of conflicting relations with the other. Nothing is resolved or established about these relations except that they are highly problematical. All this is much closer to the Ashberyan Marvell of the ‘parallel simile’ and ‘avoidance of genuine imagery’, than its Eliotic counterpart with a ‘tough reasonableness beneath the slight lyric grace’.21 Ashbery points us to his mature conception of Metaphysical poetry in the centrepiece of his first collection, ‘The Picture of Little J. A. in a Prospect of Flowers’. Ashbery’s vision of his ‘small self’ as the artist in miniature is, as the title tells us, modelled on Marvell’s ‘The Picture of Little T. C. in a Prospect of Flowers’. Marvell’s poem, taking a young female child as its subject, ambivalently moves between an attitude that observes the girl’s ‘simplicity’ and wildness, and one that cannot help but see her dominion over nature and ‘command severe’. The final four stanzas give a sense of these contradictions: II Who can foretell for what high cause This Darling of the Gods was born! Yet this is she whose chaster laws The wanton Love shall one day fear, And, under her command severe, See his bow broke and ensigns torn. Happy, who can Appease this virtuous enemy of man! III O then let me in time compound, And parley with those conquering eyes; Ere they have tried their force to wound, Ere, with their glancing wheels, they drive In triumph over hearts that strive, And them that yield but more despise. Let me be laid, Where I may see thy glories from some shade.

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IV Mean time, whilst every verdant thing Itself does at thy beauty charm, Reform the errors of the spring; Make that the tulips may have share Of sweetness, seeing they are fair; And Roses of their thorns disarm: But most procure That Violets may a longer age endure. V But O young beauty of the woods, Whom nature courts with fruits and flowers, Gather the flowers, but spare the buds; Lest Flora angry at thy crime, To kill her infants in their prime, Do quickly make the example yours; And, ere we see, Nip in the blossom all our hopes and thee.22

T. C. is at once tamer of wildness and destroyer of tame ‘hearts that strive’, at once innocent youth and sexual potentiality; she is art as well as nature, and life as well as death. Though Marvell’s poem appears to develop an argument culminating in a moral, the line of reasoning is spontaneous rather than calculated – a set of isolated, soon qualified, and therefore always contingent moments of thought, rather than conclusive statements. The source of the poet’s ambivalence is the poem’s theme of virtue’s relation to time, with the attendant unpredictability and problems of non-identity that change creates for argumentation. These problems are also the subject of ‘Little J. A.’, Ashbery’s reading of Marvell’s poem, where, from beginnings in a ‘white world’, the poem asserts that ‘time shall force a gift on each.’ We see this movement in the poem’s final two sections: II So far is goodness a mere memory Or naming of recent scenes of badness That even these lives, children, You may pass through to be blessed, So fair does each invent his virtue. And coming from a white world, music Will sparkle at the lips of many who are Beloved. Then these, as dirty handmaidens To some transparent witch, will dream Of a white hero’s subtle wooing, And time shall force a gift on each.

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That beggar to whom you gave no cent Striped the night with his strange descant. III Yet I cannot escape the picture Of my small self in that bank of flowers: My head among the blazing phlox Seemed a pale and gigantic fungus. I had a hard stare, accepting Everything, taking nothing, As though the rolled-up future might stink As loud as stood the sick moment The shutter clicked. Though I was wrong, Still, as the loveliest feelings Must soon find words, and these, yes, Displace them, so I am not wrong In calling this comic version of myself The true one. For as change is horror, Virtue is really stubbornness And only in the light of lost words Can we imagine our rewards. (ST, 28–9)

Ashbery inverts Marvell’s ‘foretelling’ to contemplate himself retrospectively, but retains in his ‘small self’ the same dialectic of past and present implicit in the figure of Little T. C. In the kernel of youthfulness is the ‘stink’ of the ‘pale’ corpse of his ‘rolled-up future’. The child, in its convergence with nature (the ‘pale and gigantic fungus’ of Ashbery’s poem, the ‘buds’ of Marvell’s), is in danger of losing itself in death. What Ashbery has ‘a hard stare accepting’ is change and mutability. As in Marvell’s poem, the central issue of ‘virtue’ is not the stable fortitude it is often conceived as, but something one invents passing through life. That ‘the loveliest feelings / Must soon find words, and these, yes, / Displace them’ seems to be a direct interpretation of Marvell’s poem, but its meaning in ‘Little J. A.’ is quite specific, generalising Marvell’s meditation on youth and innocence to speculate on the wider issues of using words. For ‘only in the light of lost words,’ the poem ends, ‘Can we imagine our rewards.’ The fact that words change their meaning, that ‘memory’ and ‘naming’ are ultimately to be conflated, creates the poem’s various ambivalences. These lost words are the poem’s testament to the ‘horror’ of change, and yet the poem retains a ‘stubbornness’ that renders a simple reading of the poem, even as an admission of change’s inevitability, problematic. The final sentence only masquerades as a logical formulation that would close the poem off in static meaning, and retains rather than resolves the tension created by ‘lost words’.

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Ashbery explores the implications of such ‘lost words’ most fully in his long poem of 1965, ‘Clepsydra’, written fifteen years later, and following his notorious experiment in ‘leaving out’ lost words altogether, 1962’s disjunctive and ruptured volume, The Tennis Court Oath.23 ‘Clepsydra’, perhaps in response to The Tennis Court Oath’s extreme solution to the questions ‘Little J. A.’ had raised, was the first time Ashbery set out to write, as he describes it, ‘a long poem that would be a long extended argument’.24 Centring around the metaphor of the water clock, however, the poem is also intended, he says, to be ‘like a stream’.25 The tension between these two aims, structured argument and simple flow, is central because the poem is essentially an argument about flow. The paradoxical nature of such an ‘extended argument’ is laid out at the beginning of the poem: Each moment Of utterance is the true one; likewise none are true, Only is the bounding from air to air, a serpentine Gesture which hides the truth behind a congruent Message, the way air hides the sky, is, in fact, Tearing it limb from limb at this very moment. (RM, 27)

Each moment is true and not true because of a ‘bounding’, the serpentine movement of meaning that undermines argument. Like ‘Little J. A.’, written ‘in the light of lost words’, ‘Clepsydra’ is a poem in which, as ‘The Skaters’ described itself a year earlier, ‘the carnivorous / Way of these lines is to devour their own nature / Leaving nothing but a bitter impression of absence’ (39). ‘Clepsydra’ continues: the condition Of those moments of timeless elasticity and blindness Was being joined secretly so That their paths would cross again and be separated Only to join again in a final assumption rising like a shout And be endless in the discovery of the declamatory Nature of the distance traveled. All this is Not without small variations and surprises, yet An invisible fountain continually destroys and refreshes the provisions. (29)

Forced constantly to reposition the poem’s argument and register its ‘small variations and surprises’, ‘Clepsydra’ is concerned with what it terms ‘becoming complicated’ (30) – that is, both how things become complicated, and how becoming itself is a complicated matter. Even this statement of scepticism stands in paradoxical relation to the rest of the poem, however, which is always questioning general

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formulation, however much such formulation emphasises the priority of the ‘moment’. An ‘assurance’ which ‘goes a long way toward conditioning / Whatever result’ (29), the poem suggests, is one of the great dangers of thinking: there would come a moment when Acts no longer sufficed and the calm Of this true progression hardened into shreds Of another kind of calm, returning to the conclusion, its premises Undertaken before any formal agreement had been reached, hence A writ that was the shadow of the colossal reason behind all this Like a second, rigid body behind the one you know is yours. (30)

The anxiety is that argument will ‘harden’ living thought into ‘shreds’. The objective of ‘Clepsydra’ is to avoid such ‘rigid’ formulation by positioning the poem in a situation, albeit here a radically abstract one whose main condition is temporality. Registering processes of thinking, the poem gives voice to the ‘coming and going’ of arguments and their extended metaphors, in which ‘the pieces’ are ‘independent / Yet symbolic of their spaced-out times of arrival’ (27). Donne can help us describe the poem. In so far as Donne’s poetry is ‘argumentative’, it contends that argument is a similar coming and going, a fact that forms the main tension of his finest poems. A love poem like ‘A Fever’ progresses by revision rather than reasoning. Here Donne, at his lover’s bedside, speculates on the possible significance and outcomes of her fever, but the argument in the poem is finally the poet’s with himself: But yet thou canst not die, I know; To leave this world behind, is death, But when thou from this world wilt go, The whole world vapours with thy breath. Or if, when thou, the world’s soul, go’st, It stay, ’tis but thy carcase then, The fairest woman, but thy ghost, But corrupt worms, the worthiest men. Oh wrangling schools, that search what fire Shall burn this world, had none the wit Unto this knowledge to aspire, That this her fever might be it? And yet she cannot waste by this, Nor long endure this torturing wrong, For much corruption needful is To fuel such a fever long.26

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More overwrought than well-wrought, rather than attempting to persuade, the poem presents the tenderness of worry and self-justification, as the poet goes back and forth between variously comforting possibilities (comforting in so far as the conceits they allow are so). The ‘point’ of Donne’s fretting and constant self-reflection is to affect, by showing the movements of metaphor and the argument’s subsequent waywardness, a rhetoric of immediacy and argumentative improvisation. Generally, Donne’s arguments are of wavering and, taken together, contradictory significance. John Carey notes that Donne’s poems ‘are, because of [their] cross-currents, virtually impossible to see clearly; they will not stay still’.27 Be it between Catholicism and Anglicanism, faith and reason, between love and misogyny, desire and despair, Donne’s major achievement is to make an art out of uneven thought itself. The agony of Donne’s oscillating convictions is the result of what might be called, when read through Ashbery, ‘inattention’ – of a restless intellect, of a mind unable, or unwilling, to concentrate. In prayer, Donne notes, I neglect God and his Angels, for the noise of a Flie, for the ratling of a Coach, for the whining of a doore . . . I finde that I had forgot what I was about, but when I began to forget it, I cannot tell. A memory of yesterdays pleasures, a feare of to morrows dangers, a straw under my knee, a noise in mine eare, a light in mine eye, an any thing, a nothing, a fancy, a Chimera in my braine, troubles me in my prayer.28

Donne’s arguments are at the mercy of such distractions because they are so tied up with the person thinking, and his uncertainty in the midst of time, emotion, desire and misjudgement. ‘Clepsydra’, like ‘A Fever’, is ‘trouble[d]’ by its cross-currents of thought. Unlike Donne’s poem, of course, Ashbery’s has an explicitly philosophical issue at stake: ‘the movement among ideas [rather] than the ideas themselves’, as Ashbery has characterised it.29 The more abstract comfort Ashbery’s poem seeks is of ‘A moment that gave not only itself, but / Also the means of keeping it’ (RM, 30). The paradoxes and inconsistencies dramatised in ‘Clepsydra’ are the result of a speculative poetics that throws out metaphors and experiments with them as it goes, some allowing the desired moments of calm more than others. Charting these moments faithfully allows only the briefest retention of them, however; ‘the argument’, seemingly with a mind of its own, ‘has already left these behind’ (27). What ‘Clepsydra’ attempts to represent is the movement and essential ungroundedness of moments of thought, which is also the impossibility of what Brooks called the ‘pretty room’ of Metaphysical argumentative metaphor. ‘Clepsydra’, if it is not anti-philosophical, is at least non-discursive.30 ‘There was no statement / At the beginning,’

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according to the poem – a key characteristic of its operations for, as Theodor Adorno tells us, ‘the interminable boredom aroused by much philosophy . . . may stem from the fact that you often know in advance how the argument will end.’31 Ashbery, that is, reads Metaphysical paradox as an argument able to resist boredom, and as a rhetoric giving the impression things have not been determined in advance. Such contradictory argumentation is all very different to the essentially static conception of Metaphysical poetry of Ashbery’s contemporaries, as theorised by the New Critics and supposedly imitated by Middle Generation poets. It was Lowell’s Lord Weary’s Castle (1946) that, for decades, served as the definitive statement on the use of Metaphysical techniques in post-war English-language poetry.32 Lowell’s most famous conceited poems in the collection, ‘Colloquy in Black Rock’, ‘Christmas in Black Rock’ and ‘Mr. Edwards and the Spider’, see scenic elements unified into the symbolic economies of extended metaphor. A poem using a similar motif to Ashbery’s water clock, ‘The First Sunday in Lent’, is illustrative in this sense: This world, this ferris wheel, is tired and strains Its townsman’s humorous and bulging eye, As he ascends and lurches from his seat And dangles by a shoe-string overhead To tell the racing world that it must die. Who can remember what his father said? The little wheel is turning on the great In the white water of Christ’s blood. The red Eagle of Ares swings along the lanes Of camp-stools where the many watch the sky: The townsman hangs, the eagle swings. It stoops And lifts the ferris wheel into the tent Pitched for the devil. But the man works loose, He drags and zigzags through the circus hoops, And lion-taming Satan bows and loops His cracking tail into a hangman’s noose.33

This reading of Metaphysical conceit, in which the poet presents an opening scenario, a question and a conclusive statement, differs from Ashbery’s in so far as it views the function of conceit as being to unify metaphoric elements, however complex, rather than proliferate them. Paradox here, embodied in the relationships of the world and its various circles, conforms to Brooks’s conception of it as a ‘logic of poetry’: Lowell’s contradictions form another aspect of argumentation, can be explained logically, and are encompassed by the ultimately solvable complexity of the poem. The poem is certainly emotional as well as

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cerebral, but there is an essential ‘precision’ in the well-wrought image of the townsman hanging by a thread from the world, and the crystallisation of the circular motif into the hangman’s noose. Keen to distinguish Ashbery from such poetry, many critics have noted the relation between paradox and metaphor in Ashbery’s work, but have often emphasised it as a rejection of Metaphysical verse. Vernon Shetley, discussing Ashbery in the language of Richards, writes: Ashbery’s practice of metaphor seems deliberately to call into question the priority of the actual to the metaphors it generates. Frequently, his metaphors involve tenor-vehicle mismatches so extreme as to suggest that the metaphor’s job of communicating information about the thing it modifies has been all but abandoned . . . [Ashberyan metaphor] is at the farthest possible remove from the Metaphysical conceit, whose revival was one of the striking stylistic features of the work of Lowell and other mainstream practitioners of the 1950s and 1960s.34

If one takes the New Critical version of the Metaphysical conceit to be definitive, then one is surely correct to oppose Ashbery’s own paradoxical ‘practice of metaphor’ to it, as Shetley does here. What we are hopefully beginning to see, however, is that Ashbery’s opposition to the species of metaphor Shetley outlines should properly be characterised as a different reading of the Metaphysicals. It is tempting, and no doubt partially correct, to describe ‘Little J. A.’ and ‘Clepsydra’ in the vocabulary of deconstruction: the slippage of signification, the trace of presence, the aporias underpinning thought. Such a description misleads, however, on the crucial anti-Romanticism that Ashbery’s reads into Metaphysical metaphor. For, if we are to speak of metaphor and paradox, we must distinguish between various kinds. Deconstruction’s reconsideration of concepts of reason and truth is, to be sure, couched in a new theory of metaphor; as Derrida says: ‘The history of metaphysics, like the history of the West, is the history of metaphors and metonymies.’35 That the centrality of the sign in this new conception of metaphor and metaphysics is essentially Romantic, however, following from the idealism of Schiller, or the radical symbolism of his English counterpart Shelley, has been often noted. Romanticism is essentially an attempt to get beyond dualism, and its conception of paradox is appropriately synthetic: the ‘dialectic battlefield’ of Kant’s antimonies is overcome by his transcendental idealism; while Hegelian ‘sublation’, far less definitively, to be sure, resolves thesis and antithesis through a conception of contradiction as a pre-condition for rational thought; even later, Whitman contradicts himself because he, gloriously, ‘contain[s] multitudes’. That deconstruction uses paradox and contradiction in a

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similar way, because of a kindred distrust of metaphysical dualism, most notably between the signifier and signified, is obvious. This is clearly a reductive reading of deconstruction, and there are obviously many ways in which deconstruction is a negation of Romanticism, but as far as argumentation goes, both can be distinguished from Metaphysical metaphor because of the latter’s conception of paradox as an essentially unsynthesised and anarchic state of affairs. As Ashbery’s 1979 poem ‘Litany’ would later characterise it, paradox gives us ‘antithesis chirping / to antithesis’ (AWK, 8) rather than synthesis – a situation explored in both ‘Little J. A.’ and ‘Clepsydra’. There are many interesting historical reasons for the Metaphysical turn towards paradox, which we cannot go into here; let it suffice us to call paradox a symptom of the conflict between anti-rationalist and rationalist modes of thought in the late sixteenth century, which dissolved confidence in faith and reason as complementary.36 The point is that Metaphysical poetry does not so much mediate between these two positions so much as it expresses their conflict, as a condition of what can broadly be termed modernity. Metaphysical poetry, though characteristically self-conscious, is essentially reckless in its paradoxicality (Ashbery’s contention that ‘most reckless things are beautiful in some way, and recklessness is what makes experimental art beautiful,’ is surely at the heart of his avantgarde reading of the Metaphysicals). Ashbery’s use of it, therefore, has quite different effects to Romantic metaphor. As I will argue later in this book, Ashbery is not always able to eschew such Romanticism; he is, though, early in his career, interested in reading the Metaphysicals as an alternative to Romantic metaphor, just as he reads John Clare as an alternative to Romantic description. * * * Ashbery’s fullest exploration of the conceit’s possibilities is ‘Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror’. Here, Ashbery brings a rich critical awareness to bear on the possibilities and dangers of metaphor as conceived in his earlier career. The primary effect of ‘Self-Portrait’ is to prompt a reconsideration of the very nature of metaphor on the part of the reader, while the poem’s central trope of the convex mirror, in its simultaneous motifs of reflection and circularity, includes a consciousness of itself. The ‘carousel’ (SP, 71) of the poem’s speculations, that is, at once continues the mobile argumentation of ‘Clepsydra’, and introduces an intensity of focus undermining such mobility, whereby the poet is seen to be circling a particular issue. The seriousness of ‘a metaphor / Made to include us’ in ‘Self-Portrait’ goes beyond the liberalism of ‘Clepsydra’, in which ‘Each moment / Of utterance is the true one.’ ‘Self-Portrait’, indeed, is

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partly a rejection of the anarchic, superficial conception of metaphor we see in the earlier poem, however much the later poem is still forced to consider such a conception. This qualification of Ashbery’s earlier experiments in metaphor is not, of course, explainable as a mere internal development of his engagement with Metaphysical poetry and forms of metaphor and argumentation. Stephen Paul Miller, in an ambitious project to read the poem as a response to the surveillance culture of the 1970s, is surely correct to stress the poem’s operations as, in general, definitively ‘post-sixties’.37 Written in 1973, the poem is part of a wider shift by New York intellectuals, of which Susan Sontag is perhaps the most notable, from a liberal recklessness to a more critical commitment in the period, not least as a result of the continuing war in Vietnam.38 Metaphysical forms, however, remain decisive for the poem. This is partly inevitable, since the Italian Mannerism of the poem’s subject, Parmigianino’s self-portrait, is the birthplace of what would become the Metaphysical conceit in England.39 That the ‘perverse light’ of the portrait is called a ‘conceit’ (70) by Ashbery in the poem is no coincidence. Parmigianino’s ‘unlikely’ (69) concetto of the convex mirror and the painting’s ‘bizarria’ of perspective (73) clearly suggest themselves as forerunners to the extravagancies of Metaphysical representation as outlined above.40 The convex mirror is, indeed, a central motif in Donne’s work, as in ‘Witchcraft by a Picture’: ‘I fixe mine eye on thine, and there / Pitty my picture burning in thine eye, / My picture drown’d in a transparent teare.’41 My point is not that Ashbery’s poem is modelled on such tropes, but that, in modelling itself on Parmigianino’s painting and method, ‘Self-Portrait’ also imitates the perceptual mind-games of the Metaphysical conceit in a way that ultimately offers a reading of both. The poetry that helps Ashbery argue about Parmigianino’s painting, that is, is Metaphysical poetry. One of the Metaphysical lyrics Ashbery wrote at Deerfield Academy in the mid-1940s suggests as much in its foreshadowing of ‘Self-Portrait’: Always the left hand flickers, falls to right; The eyes groping at mirrors Strike the sought self, opaque and firm, Safe in its frame. A sweet disorder Arranges mirrors, and the tensile gaze Turns inward, calls the turning love. Let our dual sight See not so clearly, and turning, take daylight. And before mirrors long unvisited Avoid the milk white and translucent face That stays there, that we know not how to name.42

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The closeness of the imitations of Marvell, Donne and Vaughan here mean the poem is very much in keeping with Ashbery’s other juvenilia. Equally, though, the peculiar argumentative tenor of the lines, and their interest in the logical co-ordination of mirrors, eyes and hands, mean the poem would not sound out of place in the later poem Ashbery came to write. ‘Self-Portrait’ has, again, been described in the terms of deconstruction, especially so given that its rise to prominence coincided with that of deconstruction in the US academy. Deconstructive readings have distorted ‘Self-Portrait’, however, in a way that the lens of Metaphysical poetry can help to correct. William Watkin focuses on the visual appearance of Parmigianino, finding in the poem a deconstructive motility based on the confrontation of the theme of the poem with the contradictory demands of the body proper. The ‘theme’ of the poem is the poet (painter) as subject, the ‘form’ is mannerism, and it is this central contradiction that sets off the deconstructive play of the poem.43

Like most deconstructive readings of Ashbery’s poem, Watkin’s assumes that ‘Self-Portrait’ is itself deconstructive of Parmigianino’s painting. For Watkin, this lies in how the poem ‘openly privileges the metonymic over the metaphoric’.44 This is a case often made, usually based on the poem’s apparent emphasis on surface and the spatial, and mainly in an attempt to distance Ashbery from ideas of an artwork’s ‘deep hidden meaning’, which metaphor is stereotypically linked to in such readings. Watkin finds evidence for his ‘metonymic shift’ in ‘the primary motif of the hand’, which, he says, ‘deals directly with the tropic effects of actual proximity (head-eye-mouth-hand) rather than us[ing] metaphor to carry over into other associative realms’.45 Lee Edelman similarly claims a ‘dissolution of every metaphoric necessary into the horizontal displacements of a metonymic contingency’ in the poem.46 It is true that some sort of conflict between the metaphoric and the metonymic is at stake in ‘Self-Portrait’. What is not clear is why the metaphoric should represent order and transcendence compared to democratic and contingent metonymy, or that Ashbery presents such a situation. For though Ashbery is preoccupied with the spatial features of Parmigianino’s painting, it is the question of likeness that is central to the poem’s argument – a fact illustrated by the poem’s very first word, ‘As’. Indeed, the painting is ‘really a superficial quality of the poem’, according to Ashbery.47 The movement of the poem is a deepening beyond the superficial visual qualities of the painting to a consideration of it as a ‘metaphor’ (SP, 76), and of its mirror-play as a metaphor for metaphor itself. This is not to say the poem has a deep hidden meaning,

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however; like ‘Clepsydra’, ‘Self-Portrait’ operates as a poem in which the ‘otherness’ of metaphor is seen to be ‘changing everything / Slightly and profoundly’ (81). ‘The surprise, the tension, are in the concept / Rather than its realization’ (74), according to the poem, which is consequently responsive to the process of metaphorical becoming. The primary motif of ‘Self-Portrait’ is the mirror, and not anything else. Though deconstructive emphases on metonymy in ‘Self-Portrait’ stress the fundamental synthesis of metaphor, it is the conflicting similarities and dissimilarities occurring in the mirror-play between Ashbery’s poem and Parmigianino’s portrait that are at issue. According to Paul Ricœur, ‘to see the like is to see the same in spite of, and through, the differences. The tension between sameness and difference characterises the logical structure of likeness.’48 Such a structure is suggested by Ashbery in the very first line of the poem, which has ‘the right hand’ thrust at the viewer when it is actually the painter’s left hand that we see. That Ashbery’s poem retains the title of Parmigianino’s portrait, that his viewing of its curved surface serves as a metaphor for Parmigianino’s looking at himself in the convex mirror, and that he is ‘fooled for a moment’ into thinking the face is his own, all come into conflict with the poet’s function, avowed in its first, pseudo-academic stanza, to represent the painting from an ‘outside’ position that would establish it as an object or vehicle ‘ready’ for metaphor. Rather than a static, vertical signifier, therefore, metaphor moves in the poem. This is why Ashbery makes the apparently paradoxical link between speculation and mirroring: ‘The words are only speculation / (From the Latin speculum, mirror)’ (69). Just as Ashbery attempts to understand one thing (his own self) in terms of another – the essence of metaphor – so his commentary on Parmigianino’s painting mirrors the experiential process of understanding, as he looks at a literally static but metaphorically mobile object.49 Ashbery’s partial solution to this problem is to interrogate the workings of metaphor. The term metaphor is etymologically from the Greek μεταφορά, to ferry or carry across, to transfer. Hence, in Richards’s influential vocabulary, the vehicle transports literal meaning to the target meaning of the tenor. Ashbery’s poem, likewise, employs a number of conveyance figures as metaphors for metaphor. The poem begins with concerns about Parmigianino’s ‘recurring wave of arrival’: ‘The soul establishes itself. / But how far can it swim out through the eyes / And still return safely to its nest?’ (SP, 68). The opening of the poem, thematising ideas of imprisonment and detention, introduces the key to many of the poem’s subsequent conflicts: namely, what Ashbery calls ‘The distance between us’ (71). Though Parmigianino’s is a ‘metaphor

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/ Made to include us’ (76), because ‘the soul is . . . kept / In suspension’ and ‘has to stay where it is’ (68–9), the poem initially ‘Remains a frozen gesture of welcome’ (82), and no transfer of meaning is effected. When this deadlock cannot be broken there is a breach, usually presented as communication breakdown: ‘an invitation / Never mailed, the “it was all a dream” / Syndrome’ (82). This postal metaphor for metaphor is present in the opening poem of the collection, ‘As One Put Drunk Into the Packet-Boat’ (SP, 1–2), which is based on ‘Tom May’s Death’, Marvell’s tale of the wouldbe Poet Laureate’s drunken death, ‘hurry’d hence’ on a mail-boat, ‘amaz’d on the Elysian side’.50 Ashbery’s poem, after which the book was originally entitled, moves this idea of death-ferrying and postal delivery into a realm of mirror-play which can elucidate ‘Self-Portrait’ itself. ‘A look of glass stops you / And you walk on shaken: was I the perceived?’, asks the beginning of the poem’s second stanza, and finds a clear answer: The great, formal affair was beginning, orchestrated, Its colors concentrated in a glance, a ballade That takes in the whole world, now, but lightly, Still lightly, but with wide authority and tact. (1)

As a poem anxious about communication and reception, ‘As One Put Drunk Into the Packet-Boat’ is appropriately based on Marvell’s perverse transport. What threatens communication in Ashbery’s poem is the ‘formal affair’, an unmoving ‘authority’ that, in a devious doublemeaning, ‘takes in the whole world’. In ‘Self-Portrait’, what eventually overcomes the ‘frozen gesture’, the aporia of sameness and difference, is a return to the root of metaphor as a dynamic and unfixed trope, ‘alive with filiations, shuttlings’ (75). It is metaphor’s movement, and the deeper vitality of Parmigianino’s portrait specifically, that allow Ashbery to avoid a defeatist conclusion about argumentation and communication: . . . the look Some wear as a sign makes one want to Push forward ignoring the apparent Naïveté of the attempt, not caring That no one is listening, since the light Has been lit once and for all in their eyes And is present, unimpaired, a permanent anomaly, Awake and silent. On the surface of it There seems no special reason why that light Should be focused by love. (78)

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The poem comes to identify surface with ‘those assholes / Who would confuse everything with their mirror games’ (80), and proceeds to embrace metaphor’s fluidity, in which ‘thoughts’ can ‘peel off and fly away at breathless speeds’ (71). ‘The Skaters’, written around the time that Ashbery penned a short 1964 article on Parmigianino for the New York Herald Tribune, sows the seeds of this crucial definition: ‘so much energy in those bubbles. A wise man could contemplate his face in them / With impunity’ (RM, 49–50). The convex bubble drifts, and drifts in a speculation whose aimlessness repudiates the static ‘target image’ in favour of the ‘restless’ nature of ‘Conceit’ (SP, 69, 70).51 The poem itself is subsequently able to move from the ‘Glazed, embalmed’ image of metonymical surfaces to one of metaphorical depth, revealing ‘another life . . . stocked there / In recesses no one knew of’ (75). It is by metonymy that art, in the words of the poem, ‘Follows a course wherein changes are merely / Features of the whole’ (70). Central to Ashbery’s conception of mobile metaphor is the inclusion in the poem of what is outside of the whole – what can avoid the mere ‘mirror games’ of art object and viewer. It is here that Ashbery introduces the poem’s famous digressions, ‘this universe . . . As it veers in and out’ (77). Ultimately, the ‘recesses’ of ‘Self-Portrait’ are not nooks of deep, hidden, psychic meaning waiting to be uncovered by interpretative profundity, but the ‘beautiful suburbs’ of its environment. Parmigianino’s environment is metaphorical not in so far as it is ‘deep’, but in that it is a symbol of the situatedness of artistic reception: The balloon pops, the attention Turns dully away. Clouds In the puddle stir up into sawtoothed fragments. I think of the friends Who came to see me, of what yesterday Was like. A peculiar slant Of memory that intrudes on the dreaming model In the silence of the studio as he considers Lifting the pencil to the self-portrait. How many people came and stayed a certain time, Uttered light or dark speech that became part of you Like light behind windblown fog and sand, Filtered and influenced by it, until no part Remains that is surely you. (70–1)

The later entry of the ‘shadow of the city’ (75), introducing a polis entirely absent from ‘Clepsydra’, has its own importance for the poem as a response to the political transformations of the 1970s. More generally significant, though, is that, as the ‘attention turns dully away’ to

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unrelated thoughts of friends and what yesterday was like, we recreate the environment of Parmigianino’s studio in our own situation. It is when ‘issued from hazards’ (SP, 73) that the static subject of the poem is able to become a metamorphic mirror of the thinking, reading mind. The theoretical impasse of sameness and difference is overcome not simply by metaphor as ordinarily conceived, but by a reading of it as what ‘falls off’ in the process of inattention: The hand holds no chalk And each part of the whole falls off And cannot know it knew, except Here and there, in cold pockets Of remembrance, whispers out of time. (SP, 83)

* * * The figure of the mirror as realised in ‘Self-Portrait’ would echo into much of Ashbery’s work of the late 1970s and after. In the story often told of his career, Ashbery became a different poet, with quite a different relationship to his reading public, after the success of his 1975 collection, which won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and the National Book Critics’ Circle Award. This relationship is reflected, so to speak, in his application of Metaphysical metaphor, and specifically of the mirror trope. Charles Hartman’s contention, echoing a number of similar comments, that ‘Self-Portrait’ ‘invites us to participate in his poem as an experience, as he experiences the painting’, describes the kernel of this exploration of signification and communication.52 Houseboat Days, published in 1977, continues Ashbery’s preoccupation with mirrors. ‘Wet Casements’, now one of Ashbery’s most anthologised poems, is an allegory of reader–writer relations prompted by a visit from another poet that turned into the kind of interview Ashbery was more and more frequently required to give in this period: He began asking questions that I found very deep and almost painful to contemplate . . . At one point it was almost as if we were seeing ourselves in each other. I was looking at him but it seemed as though I was looking at myself.53

The poem begins where ‘Self-Portrait’ left off: The conception is interesting: to see, as though reflected In streaming windowpanes, the look of others through Their own eyes. A digest of their correct impressions of Their self-analytical attitudes overlaid by your Ghostly transparent face. (HD, 28)

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Again, Ashbery is concerned with the relations of identity and otherness occasioned by the mirror figure. This time, though, the model is literary: Donne’s poem, ‘A Valediction: of my Name in the Window’. My name engraved herein, Doth contribute my firmness to the glass, Which, ever since that charm, hath been As hard, as that which graved it, was; Thine eye will give it price enough to mock The diamonds of either rock. ’Tis much that glass should be As all confessing, and through-shine as I, ’Tis more, that it shows thee to thee, And clear reflects thee to thine eye. But all such rules, love’s magic can undo, Here you see me, and I am you.54

Ashbery’s speculative opening seems to be in dialogue with Donne’s love poem in its distancing of concept from author – we almost hear ‘Donne’s conception is interesting.’55 ‘Wet Casements’ takes the paradox of Donne’s ‘Here you see me, and I am you’ as a starting-point for his own quandaries of interpretation. The way in which ‘others’ comments’ can be ‘overlaid’ on to the writer’s ‘transparent face’ is the source of the poem’s tensions. (These others are undoubtedly critics. A couple of years later, Ashbery writes to Harold Bloom about his work on the poet: ‘It is difficult and perhaps even a little frightening to confront one’s own gaze in a mirror in which one knows that one’s own reality is going to be, for better or worse, at last constituted.’56) That the windowpanes are ‘streaming’ is symbolic of the dynamism of this overlaying of meaning, a dynamism implicit in the very construction of the metaphor – as in Donne’s poem, the metaphor is as much the story of its ‘conception’ as of its concept.57 In an ‘epistemological snapshot of the processes’ of, simultaneously, writing and reading, Ashbery highlights the uncertainties of reception – for the poem ends up, not with ‘the person addressed’ but with someone who ‘overheard’ it. ‘Wet Casements’ is ultimately an acceptance of this contingency, of the flux of other people’s unpredictable ‘impressions’, as its ironically defeatist ending shows: I shall at last see my complete face Reflected not in the water but in the worn stone floor of my bridge. I shall keep to myself. I shall not repeat others’ comments about me. (HD, 28)

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The irony is that Ashbery’s poem does not keep to itself, and explicitly sees its reflection in ‘others’ comments’. The other is a fluid metaphor for the self; Ashbery views himself in the streaming window looking outward, rather than the static, burnished bridge of self-reflection. Donne’s poem concludes similarly, asking us finally to dismiss its virtuoso metaphorising: ‘Impute this idle talk, to that I go, / For dying men talk often so.’58 ‘Wet Casements’ draws, out of the vehicle of Donne’s love poem, a metaphor for use in poet–reader relations. Ashbery writes a number of such poems in Houseboat Days and throughout his later work.59 It is perhaps, though, ‘Paradoxes and Oxymorons’ that represents the fullest transference of Metaphysical metaphors of love to the issue of reading. ‘Paradoxes and Oxymorons’ is ‘talking to you’: This poem is concerned with language on a very plain level. Look at it talking to you. You look out a window Or pretend to fidget. You have it but you don’t have it. You miss it, it misses you. You miss each other. This poem is sad because it wants to be yours, and cannot. What’s a plain level? It is that and other things, Bringing a system of them into play. Play? Well, actually, yes, but I consider play to be A deeper outside thing, a dreamed role-pattern, As in the division of grace these long August days Without proof. Open-ended. And before you know it It gets lost in the steam and chatter of typewriters. It has been played once more. I think you exist only To tease me into doing it, on your level, and then you aren’t there. Or have adopted a different attitude. And the poem Has set me softly down beside you. The poem is you. (ShTr, 3)

The poem applies similar notions of looking and being looked at as ‘Wet Casements’, and a communicative impasse is again a source of frustration. ‘Paradoxes and Oxymorons’ is ‘concerned with language’ in so far as it is worried about it and the possibility of a ‘plain level’ of straightforward communication. Despite the direct address to the reader, however, ‘You miss it, it misses you. You miss each other.’ Again, the reason for this seems to be a question of flux: you ‘tease me into doing it, on your level, and then you aren’t there, / Or have adopted a different attitude’. Nevertheless, it is ironically within this tension that the poem finds its connection with the reader, for immediately afterward, ‘the poem / Has set me softly down beside you. The poem is you.’ ‘Paradoxes and Oxymorons’ echoes Marvell’s ‘Definition of Love’, a

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poem ‘begotten by Despair / Upon Impossibility’, which explores similar geometrical oppositions: And yet I quickly might arrive Where my extended soul is fixed, But Fate does iron wedges drive, And always crowds itself betwixt. For Fate with jealous eye does see Two perfect loves, nor lets them close, Their union would her ruin be, And her tyrannic power depose. And therefore her decrees of steel Us as the distant Poles have placed (Though Love’s whole world on us doth wheel) Not by themselves to be embraced, Unless the giddy heaven fall And earth some new convulsion tear; And, us to join, the world should all Be cramped into a planisphere. As lines (so loves) oblique may well Themselves in every angle greet: But ours so truly parallel, Though infinite, can never meet.60

Ashbery says his favourite poem is Donne’s ‘A Valediction Forbidding Mourning’, but it is this poem that he returns to again and again.61 Here, ‘Paradoxes and Oxymorons’ brings Marvell’s metaphoric ‘system’ of parallelism ‘into play’: ‘You miss it, it misses you. You miss each other.’ Like the Fate in ‘The Definition of Love’, which ‘always crowds itself betwixt’, between reader and poem in Ashbery’s lyric is ‘the steam and chatter of typewriters’ – presumably the commentary and criticism to which Ashbery was increasingly giving rise. Ashbery’s answer to the existence of ‘two perfect loves’, however, is not to assert that they ‘can never meet’, but that one must be subsumed into the other. ‘Paradoxes and Oxymorons’ demonstrates itself to be readerly property by its very rehearsal of tensions: by its inability to assert the relationship between poem and reader, Ashbery relinquishes a hold on the poem, ensuring it remains ‘open-ended’ and ‘on your level’. It is ultimately the paradoxes and problems consequent on ‘lost words’, ‘becoming complicated’ and ‘whispers out of time’ that underlie the possibility of poetry for Ashbery. The Metaphysical conceit has given Ashbery the vocabulary to explore such problems. That it has done so from Ashbery’s earliest juvenilia, to the pained speculations

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of his most famous poem, through to the more contented conceptions in his later work, is an indication of Metaphysical poetry’s importance to Ashbery. Unlike the dominant trends contemporary with his early engagement with such work, Ashbery’s reading of Donne and Marvell is a consequence of his attention to the conceit as ‘metaphor made to include us’ – with all our hard stares, moments of inattention, and our paradoxes and oxymorons intact.

Notes 1. Peter Stitt, ‘The Art of Poetry’, p. 42. 2. For accounts of this, see especially Marjorie Perloff, ‘Poètes Maudits of the Genteel Tradition’, and Paul Portuges, ‘The Poetics of Vision’. 3. W. D. Snodgrass, In Radical Pursuit, p. 42. 4. In Lowell’s case, for example, Donne’s in ‘Mr. Edwards and the Spider’, or Marvell’s in Near the Ocean. 5. John Berryman, ‘One Answer to a Question’, p. 126. Cited in David Herd, John Ashbery and American Poetry, p. 34. 6. The poems referred to here are: ‘Daffy Duck in Hollywood’ (HD, 31–4), ‘Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror’ (SP, 68–83), ‘Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape’ (DDS, 34–6) and ‘Sortes Vergilianae’ (DDS, 74–7); Bill Berkson, ‘All You Want’, in Poems, 1960–1961, New York: Tibor de Nagy Gallery, 1961. 7. John Ashbery, ‘Undergraduate Stanzas’, AM-6 (31), Ashbery archive, Houghton Library, Harvard University. 8. Ashbery, Collected Poems, pp. 890–1. Poem originally published in Harvard Advocate. 9. Frank O’Hara, The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara, p. 266; Samuel Johnson, The Lives of the Poets, p. 16. 10. Ashbery, ‘Nature Imagery in the Poetry of Marvell and Vaughan’, AM-6 (31), Houghton Library, Harvard University. 11. W. H. Auden, Foreword to Some Trees, p. 16. 12. J. A. Mazzeo, ‘A Critique of Some Modern Theories of Metaphysical Poetry’, p. 63. 13. Rosemund Tuve, Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery, p. 294; Helen Gardner, ‘The Metaphysical Poets’, p. 56. 14. Cleanth Brooks, The Well-Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry, p. 3. 15. Ibid., pp. 3, 9. 16. Ibid., p. 16. 17. T. S. Eliot, Selected Prose, p. 243. 18. John Donne, The Complete English Poems, p. 73. 19. Locus Solus II, p. 201. 20. Andrew Marvell, The Complete Poems, pp. 103–4. 21. Eliot, Selected Essays, p. 252. 22. Marvell, The Complete Poems, pp. 63–4. 23. The distinction between ‘putting it all in’ and ‘this leaving out business’ has

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24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

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become such a staple of Ashbery criticism as to require little comment. The distinction, which first appears in ‘The Skaters’, has been a useful one for critics charting the movements of Ashbery’s early career as a negotiation between fragmentation (leaving out) and proliferation (putting in). Ashbery himself has confirmed that ‘it is really a major theme in my poetry’ (Fred Moramarco, ‘John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara: The Painterly Poets’, p. 454). Richard Kostelanetz, ‘How to be a Difficult Poet’, p. 9. Ibid., p. 9. Donne, The Complete English Poems, pp. 57–8. John Carey, John Donne: Life, Mind and Art, p. 45. Donne, John Donne’s Sermons, p. 25. Stitt, ‘The Art of Poetry’, pp. 44–5. Charles Altieri has aptly described this in Ashbery’s work generally: ‘Nondiscursiveness sits within the very heart of argument because poetic conventions can be manipulated to focus attention on the overdetermination latent in all our discursive practices and habits of thought’ (Self and Sensibility in Contemporary American Poetry, p. 26). Theodor Adorno, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, pp. 60–1. For discussions of this see: Antin, ‘Modernism and Postmodernism’, pp. 109–21; Altieri, The Art of Twentieth Century Poetry, pp. 158–9; Perloff, ‘Poètes Maudits of the Genteel Tradition’. Robert Lowell, Collected Poems, p. 20. Vernon Shetley, After the Death of Poetry: Poet and Audience in Contemporary America, pp. 120–1. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 79. See also Jacques Derrida, ‘White Mythology’. See especially Carey, John Donne: Life, Mind and Art, pp. 215–36. In Donne’s case, the formal logic of scholasticism, once the orthodoxy of Europe in the shape of works like Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica, was beginning to be challenged by the fervent irrationality of Calvinism, accompanied by a renaissance of classical scepticism. In opposition to the Aristotelian confidence of Thomism, which emphasised the complementarities of reason and faith, of the world and human comprehension, these new writers insisted on God’s transcendence of an ultimately feeble human reason, and the necessary contingency of human judgement. It is no surprise that Donne, an apostate of Catholicism, is to be found encouraging us to ‘doubt wisely’. Donne, in this context, adopts a scepticism which allows arguments, conceits and statements to change according to whatever mood his mercurial temperament takes. Donne’s is a searching reason that fights, usually unsuccessfully, against a ‘riddling, perplexed, labyrinthicall soule’. Though for Marvell this divided consciousness has reached a more advanced stage, his treatment and use of paradox remains Donnean in essence. By the mid-1600s, rationalism has found systematic expression in Cartesian idealism and Baconian empiricism, and therefore Marvell’s engagement with reason is on much more secular ground. He is, as his ‘Dialogue’ above shows, not so much concerned with matters of faith and reasons, as with body and mind. Marvell, writing also in the context of Hobbes and the upheaval of the Civil War, is furthermore constantly weary

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37. 38.

39.

40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58.

John Ashbery and English Poetry of the political dangers of overdetermination, as his ode on Cromwell illustrates most brilliantly. See Stephen Paul Miller, Seventies Now: Culture as Surveillance, pp. 138–62. Sontag’s move from the ‘erotics of art’ called for in Against Interpretation and the celebration of apolitical anarchism in ‘Notes of Camp’ (both 1964), to the sombre call for ‘the abolition of art itself’ in ‘The Aesthetics of Silence’ (1967), and its correlation with conscientious objection, is clearly a move that is symptomatic of wider changes taking place in the American conception of art’s politics. See William Keast, Seventeenth Century English Poetry. Ashbery himself calls Parmigianino ‘a precursor of de Chirico’, a painter he labels ‘Metaphysical’ (article on Parmigianino in New York Herald Tribune, 20 October 1964, p. 31; and ‘Metaphysical Overtones’, New York, 11 February 1980). For a general discussion of such connections, see L. E. Semler, The English Mannerist Poets and the Visual Arts, and Wylie Sypher, Four Stages of Renaissance Style, pp. 119–21. Donne, The Complete English Poems, p. 42. Cited in John Shoptaw, On the Outside Looking Out, p. 178. William Watkin, In the Process of Poetry: The New York School and the Avant-garde, p. 187. Ibid., p. 188. Ibid., pp. 189, 188. Lee Edelman, ‘The Pose of Imposture: Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” ’, p. 104. John Tranter, ‘John Ashbery in Conversation’, p. 94. Paul Ricœur, The Rule of Metaphor, p. 148. His emphasis. For a Lacanian account of this phenomenon, see Anita Sokolsky, ‘A Commission That Never Materialised’. Marvell, Complete Poems, pp. 58–60. The shape of the painting itself is slippery and metamorphic in the poem. It is variously described as ‘balloon’ (SP, 70), ‘globe’ (70, 76) ‘ping-pong ball secure on its jet of water’ (70), ‘puddle’ (70), ‘carousel’ (71), ‘silver blur’ (72), ‘circle of [Parmigianino’s] intentions’ (72), ‘reptile eggs’ (72), ‘hourglass’ (72), ‘snow-globe’ (74), ‘looking glass’ (75), ‘birdcage’ (77), ‘easel’ (78), ‘crystal ball’ (81) and ‘the gibbous / Mirrored eye of an insect’ (82–3). Charles O. Hartman, Free Verse, p. 168. Cited in Shoptaw, On the Outside Looking Out, p. 199. Donne, The Complete English Poems, p. 87. The figure is not unique to ‘Wet Casements’; ‘The Skaters’ can be found ‘scratching in dust a name on the mirror’ (RM, 40). John Ashbery, letter to Harold Bloom, 18 November 1979, AM-6 (23), Houghton Library, Harvard University. However, the opening found in the Farrar, Straus & Giroux edition, quoted here, is changed in subsequent collections and publications to ‘The concept is interesting.’ Donne, The Complete English Poems, p. 89.

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59. Indeed, there is a book dedicated to the subject: John Emil Vincent’s John Ashbery and You: His Later Books. 60. Marvell, The Complete Poems, pp. 49–50. 61. Irene Sege, ‘Words to Live By’, p. G3.

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Chapter Two

‘The music of all present’: Ashberyan description and the presence of John Clare

In November 1989, as part of his Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard, Ashbery gave a talk on John Clare, a writer with whom he had been engaging since the 1960s.1 The lecture coincided with a renewed interest in Clare’s work around the world, among academics and poets alike, following decades of campaigning to reclaim the peasant poet. Recast as a knowing Romantic from his marginalised position as a ‘natural’, or positioned as a uniquely articulate witness of nineteenth-century enclosure and rural marginalisation, Clare had begun to achieve, by the late 1980s, the deserved pre-eminence as a nature poet he holds today. Ashbery’s lecture does not make a case for Clare’s historical importance, however, so much as it views his work as an earlier embodiment of Ashberyan motifs. Remarkably, Ashbery’s lecture avoids all reference to Clare’s subject matter. One of many contemporary poets who admire Clare, Ashbery is unique in his refusal to treat Clare as a Romantic, a peasant-intellectual, a victim of enclosure or indeed as a historical figure at all. British poets like Tom Paulin, Seamus Heaney and James Fenton, for instance, read Clare only within an analysis of certain cultural issues. All these poets place particular stress on Clare’s isolation from the mainstream literary culture of the early 1800s, his use of dialect and his relationship with his local landscape. Fenton, the poet who cried ‘tears of boredom’ over Ashbery’s Selected Poems, is concerned with botanical issues like whether Clare’s use of the word ‘pellitory’ is to be taken as Parietaria judaica, reeds, or Iris pseudacorus.2 Paulin’s close-reading approach to Clare is part of an interest in non-official, marginalised poetic language: ‘To “soodle” down a lane is more than to walk it, it is to linger, dawdle, saunter, take the whole place and atmosphere in, and the word also resonates with another favourite, “sloomy”, which means “slow, dreamy”.’3 Ashbery’s commentary in his lecture can seem insubstantial by contrast: ‘it would not occur to [Clare] to do otherwise than it would

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occur to Whitman to stop singing you his song of himself. It is like that “instant intimacy” for which we Americans are so notorious in foreign climes’ (OT, 16). The subject of Clare’s work is of negligible interest to Ashbery; he is not there for the birds’ nests or the flora of nineteenthcentury Northamptonshire. When Ashbery praises Clare for ‘captur[ing] the rhythms of nature, its vagaries and messiness’ (OT, 15), it is not the rhythms of nature he is interested in, but the form of the capture. This is why the poets Ashbery discusses in the Norton lectures are important to him less for what they say about the world, and more for what they can do for him as a poet. Ashbery’s reason for speaking on his ‘other traditions’, he says, is to give an idea of ‘the impetuses behind’ his poetry – it is ‘the poetry that I notice when I write, that is behind my own poetry’ (OT, 4). Clare, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Laura Riding, John Wheelwright and David Schubert are discussed because they are ‘jumpstart’ poets for Ashbery, ‘poets I have at some period turned to when I really needed to be reminded yet again of what poetry is’ (OT, 5). In this, Ashbery’s lecture on Clare serves as a retrospective on his own poetry, especially that of his most pastoral volume, The Double Dream of Spring (1970), where his debts to Clare are most visible. We can compare Ashbery’s reading of the poet to that of his more scholarly counterparts in reference to this volume. Here are the openings of Ashbery’s 1969 prose poem, ‘For John Clare’, and Paulin’s ‘The Writing Lark’, a kind of letter to Clare, published in 1998: Kind of empty in the way it sees everything, the earth gets to its feet and salutes the sky. More of a success at it this time than most others it is. The feeling that the sky might be in the back of someone’s mind. Then there is no telling how many there are. They grace everything – bush and tree – to take the roisterer’s mind off his caroling – so it’s like a smooth switch back. To what was aired in their previous conniption fit. (DDS, 35) Dear Mr Clare Dear John Clare I’ll start with pudge – pudge not budge pudge because pudge is a smashed puddle A muddy puddle on a track Or a whole clatter Scattered like broken plates – shiny plates on scoggy scroggy marshland – each pudge is like piss cupped in a cow-clap so I imagine a boot.4

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Paulin the poet takes as his subject the same thing as Paulin the critic. There is not only a celebration of Clare’s vernacular, but also an attempt to imitate its supposed physicality. Paulin in the main, though, achieves an imitative quality with the easy omission of punctuation as much as anything else, and attentive to Clare’s language as it may be, this attentiveness is always at an awkward remove that makes it hard to confuse his lines with poetry. Ashbery’s poem does something quite different. It does not, like Paulin’s, go back to Clare’s work, but comes out of it. ‘For John Clare’ immerses itself in Clarean aesthetics and proceeds from there, rather than positioning itself as a retrospective of the poet’s language. Ashbery’s colloquialisms, for example, are inspired by Clare’s immediacy of diction rather than his particular, historical dialect, and therefore manifest this immediacy in obviously American idioms: ‘kind of empty’, ‘conniption fit’, ‘a spreading out, like’, ‘tryin’ to tell us somethin’’, ‘dumb bird’. Equally, while Ashbery elides the non-punctuation so distinctive of Clare’s work, this work is evidently there, for Ashbery avoids it only by over- and mis-punctuating (the beginning above contains half a dozen subordinate fragments). The effect is Clarean in that it affects a spontaneous rethink typical of the ‘immediacy’ Ashbery makes so much of in his lecture – the full stop is in place, but that is not going to prevent Ashbery adding to the impression.5 ‘For John Clare’ offers a digest of Ashbery’s reading of Clare – in Quintilian’s classical terms, a liquefaction of the Clarean mode as Ashbery sees or remembers it: the pulp. Intertextual criticism calls this ‘an Aufhebung of the dialectic between our own present text and its “originating” model’, and dialectic seems appropriate here: unlike Paulin’s poem, which simply retrospectively enforces a critical analysis on Clare’s language, ‘For John Clare’ originates in, or is jump-started by, the presence of the Clarean model at the same time as it surveys it.6 Ashbery’s poem differs from the conventional dedicational poem of the 1960s in ways that are revealing about his sense of reading generally. Following the example of Robert Lowell’s confession-by-proxy dedication as influentially put forth in Imitations (1961), poems like Adrienne Rich’s ‘ “I Am in Danger, Sir –” ’ about Dickinson, and many of John Berryman’s dedicational Dream Songs, respond to the past, as object, from a clearly defined subjective position. For all their emotional content, such poems, like ‘The Writing Lark’, have partly scholarly aims that result in a conscious distancing from the earlier poet. Rather than becoming ‘immersed in the details’ of reading past poetry, and writing both out of and about this reading experience, most of Ashbery’s contemporaries had relationships with their poetic models not entirely distinct from T. S. Eliot’s ‘historical sense’.

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‘For John Clare’, then, provides a reading of Clare that, as another ‘allegory of reading’, also gives intimations of Ashbery’s poetics. The poem continues: There is so much to be seen everywhere that it’s like not getting used to it, only there is so much it never feels new, never any different. You are standing looking at that building and you cannot take it all in, certain details are already hazy and the mind boggles. What will it all be like in five years’ time when you try to remember? Will there have been boards in between the grass part and the edge of the street? (DDS, 35)

Ashbery’s suggestion, in his lecture, that ‘experiencing is the same as telling’ for Clare (OT, 18) seems to be taken literally here. We are told how ‘the earth gets to its feet’ simultaneously with the poet or poem doing so. The ‘mind boggles’, as it frequently does in Ashbery’s work, confronted with the sublime (‘you cannot take it all in’), but inverts Edmund Burke’s emphasis on largeness and darkness towards what Ashbery finds compelling in Clare: detail. ‘Certain details are already hazy’: because of the level of detail (‘there is so much’) and description’s relationship with time (‘the music of all present’), there is difficulty ‘getting used to it’. Ashbery’s figure of the photograph goes into more depth on this: ‘they are already gone, gone far into the future, into the night of time. If we could look at a photograph of it and say there they are, they never really stopped but there they are.’ The couple are already gone, in Ashbery’s beautiful phrase, ‘into the night of time’, but have been stopped in the freezing of time that the photograph fraudulently affects. The ‘mind boggles’ among the real-time detail; unlike the photograph, which imposes stasis and claims objectivity, description for Ashbery, via Clare, is a matter of ‘letting [things] come to you for once’. Ashbery, like Clare, is interested in the phenomenological issues at stake in perception: what ‘not getting used to it’ means; what it is to be ‘forced to notice’, to ‘try to remember’ in the midst of writing and experiencing, seeing and describing. The answer to such questions is couched in terms of inattention, as problems of perception are occasioned by a certain concentration that distorts the world. We are continually ‘waiting for something to be over until [we] are forced to notice it.’ To put what is noticed aside is to let attention rationalise experience, what is happening now, out of existence. Clare, however, is one of the great noticers at all times: a poet of ‘the music of all present’, according to ‘For John Clare’. As Ashbery says in his lecture, ‘the effect of Clare’s poetry, on me at least is always the same – that of re-inserting me in my present, of re-establishing “now” ’ (OT, 19). Clare claims to encounter the world naked, abandoning the abstract

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categorisation of thought whose ‘truths are fled and left behind / A real world and doubting mind’.7 ‘I found the poems in the fields / And only wrote them down,’ Clare says in lines approvingly quoted by Ashbery (OT, 17). Clare’s major achievement is to write the first poetry in the English tradition to make description an end in itself.8 Doing so is a complicated matter, but my claim here is that, in order to make such a descriptive poetry aesthetically meaningful, Clare makes stories out of his descriptions. In making description narratological, Clare constructs a poetics responsive to movement and change, and in doing so creates a poetry able to describe time itself passing. The Clare valued by Ashbery is not the natural historian or the bird-watcher per se, but a different kind of watcher (and, in a sense, a different kind of historian), of time passing. Clare ‘inserts’ Ashbery in his own present because, in effect, Ashbery reads Clare as a narrative rather than a descriptive poet – as a poet whose description charts time rather than detailing things. Clare’s descriptive attentiveness, his ‘dispatches from the front’ (OT, 19), are for Ashbery synonymous with a radical nowness, an attention to the present and the process of becoming. For Ashbery, this is what makes Clare a poet of the ‘other tradition’ he speaks about in his Norton lectures – a poet that allows Ashbery to short-circuit the dominant Romantic tradition with which Clare is associated. More fundamentally, analysing Ashbery’s relationship with Clare can help us work towards a definition of how Ashbery confronts nowness in a poem, and what happens when Ashbery describes. Ashbery adapts Clare, and a good deal of Ashbery’s earliest aesthetic concerns can be brought into sharper focus by analysing this adaptation. * * * The writing that emerges from Ashbery’s reading of Clare is rooted in a particular response to Romanticism. The 1950s and 1960s demanded a new reading of Romanticism for interlinked historical and aesthetic reasons: historical as a response to the Second World War, aesthetic as a response to Modernism. Ashbery, living in the aftermath of Fascism in his early career, shared the political orientation of a Western world that looked towards what had mainly fought Fascism, and seemed the most reliable guard against its future emergence – liberalism. In 1956, the same year as the publication of Some Trees, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev delivered a speech critical of Stalin, ‘On the Personality Cult and its Consequences’; in the West, this would lead to the liberalisation of committed Marxists and radical socialists under the name of the New Left, a movement especially powerful in the US.9 Whatever his views on the political possibilities of poetry, Ashbery, like his New York School

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colleagues, broadly indentified himself with such politics, particularly at the time of the Vietnam War, and was consequently concerned with creating an aesthetic that avoided any vestige of authoritarian structure without simply withdrawing into meaningless solipsism.10 The later work of the Frankfurt School is most symptomatic of left intellectuals’ move away from metaphysics, and can inform our reading of certain decisions made by Ashbery. Theodor Adorno’s Negative Dialectics (1966) and Aesthetic Theory (1970) posit the link between an Enlightenment-rationalistic way of encountering the world and authoritarian political regimes. American theorist Martin Jay summarises the cornerstone of Adorno’s aesthetic theory, mimesis, thus: Conceptual thought can be understood as an act of aggression perpetrated by a dominating subject on a world assumed to be external to it; it subsumes particulars under universals, violently reducing their uniqueness to typifications or exemplars of a general or essential principle. [Adorno’s concept of] mimesis, in contrast, involves a more sympathetic, compassionate, and noncoercive relationship of affinity between non-identical particulars, which do not then become reified into two poles of a subject / object dualism.11

While Adorno’s philosophical concerns are not necessarily Ashbery’s, the motive force behind Adorno’s thinking is the same as that behind Ashbery’s ‘historical present’. Although Ashbery is unlikely to have ever read Adorno, we find in his work a poetic analogue to Adorno’s philosophical resistance to an authoritative, interpretative approach to the world. Ashbery does not seek to invent a new theory of conceptual thought as Adorno does, but he does seek out a mimetic writer, without the ‘aggression’, in Clare – within, that is, the historical moment of subject / object dualism par excellence, Romanticism. Ashbery’s Clare is descriptive in a way that is non-dualistic, without resorting to the primitivism that Adorno was also anxious to disqualify. If, as Adorno claims, his negative dialectics ‘means intransigence towards all forms of reification’, for Ashbery, as a poet sharing Adorno’s concerns and historical moment, it is Clarean detail and description that is at once meaningful and non-generalising.12 Ashbery’s specific intellectual climate enforces such a turn to Clare. Just as Adorno wrestles with Enlightenment philosophy, so American poetry in the 1950s and 1960s is urgently rethinking its relationship with Romantic aesthetics. Charles Altieri’s study of 1960s American poetry, Enlarging the Temple, analyses the philosophical assumptions underlying the decade’s poetic revolt against High Modernism, and finds them structured along two main lines, both originating in Romanticism: Wordsworthian ‘immanence’ and Coleridgean ‘symbolism’. For Altieri,

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these two originally congenial aesthetics have, since the demise of certain central Romantic concepts, diverged from each other to form distinct and, in the context of the move from Middle Generation poetry toward postmodernism, opposing poetics. The important one for postmodern poets is the Wordsworthian poetics of immanence, where, Altieri says, the logic of poetry need not depend on formal structures seen as interpretive patterns. When poets conceive of their work as presenting the action of disclosure rather than of creating order, the formal elements work somewhat differently. In a poetic of immanence, aesthetic elements have primarily epistemological rather than interpretive functions.13

In a symbolist poetics, on the other hand, ‘what matters is not what there is in immediate experience but what the mind can make of it . . . transform[ing] the flux of human experience into coherent perceptual and axiological structures.’14 Wordsworth’s poetics can, then, be distinguished from Coleridgean harmonising by its belief in an ‘inscrutable workmanship’ in the world and a faith that merely being in it is already enough to ‘reconcile / Discordant elements’, as The Prelude has it. What postmodernism attempts, according to Altieri, is a renovation of this immanent aesthetic in reaction to the high symbolism of the later Eliot, Lowell and the Middle Generation, and a return to ‘the insistence that the moment immediately and intensely experienced can restore one to harmony with the world and provide ethical and psychological renewal’.15 A tension is created in this Wordsworthian ancestry, however, because of its religious foundation and investment in an impossible transcendent presence. American poetry, therefore, seeks to reinterpret the category of immanence. For Altieri this is broadly a question of suspending disbelief regarding the Romantic belief in God, and of inverting Romantic immanence so that poetry can communicate the loss and yearning for presence. American poetry, that is, must seek identification with the world, rather than the identification of a God immanent within it. In this regard Ashbery’s case is unique, we must note, because he finds a poet, ready-made as it were, already challenging the religioussublime elements of Romanticism from within. In his early work, that is, Ashbery positions Clare at the forefront of a Romantic aesthetic that allows him to read Romanticism itself differently. For Ashbery, Clare is a source of immanent value that avoids symbolist and religious investments, while retaining meaning and aesthetic value. The root of Ashberyan immanence usually listed by critics is Emerson (extending to Whitman and Stevens). ‘Since Emerson, it has been one of the primary suppositions of American poets that all of experience constitutes a form

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of poetry. Nothing more clearly distinguishes American poetry from its European counterparts than this insistent redefinition of the immanent in the phenomenal world,’ according to one commentator.16 The principal reason for this perception lies, justifiably enough, in Emerson’s thought. Emerson’s ideas of the commerce between man and nature, in which ‘all mean egotism vanishes,’ prescribe many of the hallmarks of the Ashberyan mode (unassertive identity, self-contradiction, immersion in environment). Emerson’s practice is another thing altogether, however, and it is significant that his work leads to poetry where egotism does anything but vanish – Whitman, Pound and Ginsberg, for example. Ashbery, like many of his contemporaries, confronted with the authoritarian spectres of Eliot and Pound, is anxious to avoid a poetics with any trace of symbolism’s transcendent author figure. Clare, unlike Emerson and other Romantic figures, sets a different example of Romantic experience, and expresses an immanent poetics unaccounted for by Altieri. In so far as Emerson’s immanence is theoretical, his ‘transparent eyeball’ is rather too apparent for its own good; Clare, on the other hand, a pure practitioner, has no poetics outside the poetry. The letter from John Taylor, Clare’s publisher, to Clare, urging him to ‘Speak of the Appearances of Nature . . . more philosophically’, is famous because it expresses the genuine newness of Clare’s avoidance of abstract sentiment.17 A crucial contention in John Barrell’s seminal work on Clare, The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place, is that Clare approaches landscapes without any a priori conception of it – that he makes no connection between an abstract, presumed structure of landscape and the landscape at hand.18 It is important to note the departure Clare makes here from both the Claudian–Thomsonian and Romantic traditions in which he has been historically situated. James Thomson and his mid-eighteenth-century imitators were concerned with tableaux, almost always at a distance, trying to capture nature in a single coup d’œil. Given this painterly bias, they are always mapping an observed scene on to an ideal one, seeking a ‘correct’ composition. For Clare, on the other hand, as Barrell points out, ‘pleasure is not in the design, and the active control over a landscape, but in the multiplicity and the particularity of images in the landscape, which he cannot control and before which he is passive.’19 These qualities are most visible in one of Clare’s most haunting poems, a sonnet upon a mouse’s nest: I found a ball of grass among the hay & proged it as I passed & went away & when I looked I fancied something stirred

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& turned agen & hoped to catch the bird When out an old mouse bolted in the wheat With all her young ones hanging at her teats She looked so odd & so grotesque to me I ran & wondered what the thing could be & pushed the knapweed bunches where I stood When the mouse hurried from the crawling brood The young ones squeaked & when I went away She found her nest again among the hay The water oer the pebbles scarce could run & broad old sexpools glittered in the sun.20

There is none of Thomson’s focus and scope in this perspective ‘flitting’. The poem’s movements are a question of attention; even in the fourteen lines of a sonnet, Clare is unable to keep his eye on the object at hand. Having begun a poem about a mouse’s nest, Clare ends with a complete non sequitur: ‘The water oer the pebbles scarce could run / And broad old sexpools glittered in the sun.’ Though these last two lines have been interpreted in terms of an Eliotic ‘objective correlative’, expressing dejection at maternal abandonment, there is a much simpler explanation: Clare looks away. Thematic decorum is abandoned; if a glittering cesspool catches Clare’s eye before his fourteen lines are up, then this is the image that ends the poem. Clare’s poetry is open to extrinsic phenomena; like the mouse, he abandons the ‘crawling brood’, ‘bolting’ his focus elsewhere. This inattention is important for distancing Clare from mainstream Romanticism as well as the Claudian tradition. Resisting ‘interpretive patterns’, the poem is the work of immanent ‘disclosure’ of which Altieri speaks. Clare’s immersion is categorically not in his subject, however; he looks up from the mouse’s nest, and the poem abandons it in those final two lines. The immanence for Clare is in observation itself rather than phenomena. This explains John Middleton Murry’s curious but suggestive comment that Clare’s vision does not ‘pass beyond itself’.21 It is also what we saw Ashbery suggest in ‘For John Clare’, where details are paradoxically hazy because of their sheer abundance, and the very power of Clare’s eye for detail. Clare’s poetics in ‘The Mouse’s Nest’ precludes meditation. ‘Here is Clare on his rounds again, telling us what he has just seen but neglecting to mention why he thinks it ought to interest us or even him’ (OT, 33), says Ashbery of the poem. In the discussion of the nest, Clare elects, as in all his descriptions, for a deadpan realism. The description, though, is contingent on the movements of a mouse and, finally, on an unrelated and unpredictable event of glittering water. Reflexive rather than reflective, Clare’s physical involvement in the scene

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precludes certain levels of conceptual involvement. This perceptual rhetoric of passivity here is the opposite of a poet like Coleridge, for whom ‘all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead.’22 In ‘Frost at Midnight’, for example, Coleridge’s detachment from the outside world, meditating in the timeless, midnight hour of his sitting room, makes no demands on the poet to keep up with a changing landscape, rejecting attentive vigilance in favour of abstract musings in an atemporal space. In many ways, Clare’s method is symptomatic of a wider drive for authentic observation and experience in art in the Romantic period; to an extent, Clare is another Romantic landscape artist abandoning the studio to paint in situ. The effect is specific, however, as Ashbery explains in his lecture: The sudden, surprising lack of distance between poet and reader is in proportion to the lack of distance between the poet and the poem; he is the shortest distance between poem and reader. We are far from emotion recollected in tranquillity or even from the gently shaping music of Keats’ grasshopper sonnet. Clare’s poems are dispatches from the front. (OT, 17)

This is, one feels, the kind of poetry to which Ashbery himself aspires. Clare’s closeness for Ashbery here is temporal as much as spatial: ‘sudden’, ‘surprising’ and contrasted to Wordsworth’s poetry of recollection. Reader–writer–poem proximity is a question of timing: ‘Clare grabs hold of you – no, he doesn’t grab hold of you, he is already there, talking to you before you’ve arrived on the scene’ (OT, 15–16). As a reader, you are already too late, but this is what makes it interesting. Clare, whether suddenly impersonating birdsong in rhymed tetrameter, collaring the reader in a drama of bird-watching, or acting as a mouthpiece for landscape features, has a rhetoric of immediacy that reduces poet–poem–reader distances.23 The rhetoric is of ‘a landscape heard and felt and seen’, to use Clare’s words, or a manifold of sense impressions, to use our own. Clare is not, then, a product of the synthesising imagination of Coleridge via Kant, for whom the ‘manifold’ is a paradigm of the unknowable: for information to be of any use to us, we must organise the information. This organisation is provided by acts of synthesis. By synthesis, in its most general sense, I understand the act of putting different representations together, and of grasping what is manifold in them in one knowledge.24

Instead, meditation is resisted in Clare’s work because of the attempt to get at a simultaneity of writing and happening; the passing of time is effected as co-existent with the passage of the poem. Presence in his poetry, therefore, receives its latent temporal emphasis. Clare’s rhetoric

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of immersion and presence claims not to need the preparation and organisation so central to Kant’s synthesising categories. As Ashbery says, ‘Clare makes this rapid transfer believable, since for him experiencing is the same as telling’ (OT, 18). In Ashbery’s work, too, ‘Everything drops in before getting sorted out’ (TP, 12). The Double Dream of Spring, like Clare’s poetry, works to close down boundaries between poet, poem and reader, as a volume where landscape details are ‘offered to your participation’. Ashbery’s title poem, though alluding to a painting by the Greco-Italian Surrealist Giorgio de Chirico, is one of the collection’s most Clarean. ‘The Double Dream of Spring’ begins, typically, by setting out the power of landscape over that of the mind: ‘Mixed days, the mindless years, perceived / With half-parted lips / The way the breath of spring creeps up on you and floors you’ (DDS, 41). Synthesis is deemed unnecessary; ‘the design is complete’ already in the poem’s landscape, and with the combined description and movement that follows, the reader is caught up in the poem’s situation: The design is complete And one keeps walking down to the shore Footsteps searching it Yet they can’t have it can’t not have the tune that way. And we keep stepping . . . down . . . The rowboat rocked as you stepped into it. How flat its bottom The little poles pushed away from the small waves in the water And so outward. Yet we turn To examine each other in the dream. (41; Ashbery’s ellipses)

The movement described, mirrored by the ellipses and line endings (‘down . . . /’), seems to occur simultaneously with the poem, and the lines directly address the reader in a way that aligns them with the present. Clare’s ‘The Nightingales Nest’, also a walking poem, positions itself similarly: Her joys are ever green her world is wide – Hark there she is as usual lets be hush For in this black thorn clump if rightly guest Her curious house is hidden – part aside These hazel branches in a gentle way & stoop right cautious neath the rustling boughs.25

Like many of Clare’s bird nest poems, this passage enacts a struggle to keep up with its subject, and the literal conversation with the reader reinforces this urgency; pressing communications of a more practical

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nature interrupt the small talk of abstraction. Though writer and reader eventually scare the bird away in his poem, it is not the bird itself that is primarily of interest to Clare, but rather the unfolding story of its partial discovery, the thrill of the chase. As John Barrell says, the point for Clare ‘is not so much to describe a landscape, or even to describe each place, as to suggest what it is like to be in each place’.26 ‘The Double Dream of Spring’, likewise, expends no energy in conventional descriptions of spring or dreams, despite being a descriptive poem. Its focus, rather, is on the problems of describing generally; the poet is ‘Caught, lost in millions of tree-analogies’. While the landscape itself is unmistakably De Chirican, locomotives and all, the perceptual rhetoric is Clare’s. Therefore the immersed description of its ‘mixed days’, while generalising in a way that Clare would never allow, is, like Clare’s bird nests and heath phenomena, something that prevents a deep contemplation of them by the poet. The vagueness and generality of the poem is in fact a symptom of its Clarean immediacy, a kind of extended manifold. Before the poem is allowed to come to anything like a conclusion, it is abruptly ended, like ‘Mouse’s Nest’, by a noticed phenomenon that, it seems, must end it: ‘day comes up’ (DDS, 42). Other poems from The Double Dream of Spring enact a similar dynamic. ‘Years of Indiscretion’, for example, is a landscape poem, but one that avoids the hypostasis and various semantic levels found in the American ‘scenic’ verse of the 1970s by poets like William Stafford. Again, Ashbery seeks to construct a rhetoric of ‘the present’: Whatever your eye alights on this morning is yours: Dotted rhythms of colors as they fade to the color, A grey agate, translucent and firm, with nothing Beyond its purifying reach. It’s all there. These are things offered to your participation. These pebbles in a row are the seasons. This is a house in which you may wish to live. There are more than any of us to choose from But each must live its own time. And with the urging of the year each hastens onward separately In strange sensations of emptiness, anguish, romantic Outbursts, visions and wraiths. One meeting Cancels another. ‘The seven-league boot Gliding hither and thither of its own accord’ Salutes these forms for what they now are: Fables that time invents To explain its passing. They entertain The very young and the very old, and not

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One’s standing up in them to shoulder Task and vision, vision in the form of a task So that the present seems like yesterday And yesterday the place where we left off a little while ago. (DDS, 46)

The paratactical style and conversational address here imitate the march of time (‘the urging of the year’) that is its subject. Like Clare’s work, the poem emphasises the contingency of its consecutive attempts to get a handle on the present – attempts that end up as ‘Fables that time invents / To explain its passing’. The details here, ‘offered to your participation’, ultimately take on the ‘sudden, surprising lack of distance’ that Ashbery admires in Clare, ‘gliding hither and thither’ so that ‘the present seems like yesterday / And yesterday the place where we left off a little while ago’. Clare’s address is admittedly a good deal simpler than Ashbery’s, not to mention more concrete. Despite differences in form, however, Ashbery finds in Clare a model of poetic immanence without the usual accompanying theological architecture – an aesthetic of presence, that is, without what Ashbery calls, in a poem about Wordsworth, ‘metaphysical reasons’ (‘The Preludes’, AWK, 91). Clare’s work is always physical rather than metaphysical. What Clare offers is not a poetry that questions such quasi-theological ideas as, say, Stevens does contemplatively in ‘Sunday Morning’, but one that simply gets on with it, with no inclination even to countenance ideas on such abstract and meditational levels. The situation is a version of Ashbery’s ideas about O’Hara’s work: ‘it does not attack the establishment. It merely ignores its right to exist . . . all his poems are all about him and the people and images who wheel through his consciousness, and they seek no further justification.’27 Clare’s own ‘justification’, narrative, is central to his poetics, and how Clare justifies his descriptions without going beyond them, through the story, allows us to see the sense in which Ashbery is also a descriptive poet. * * * The nature of description is a central question for Clare because his poetry is contemporaneous with a European crisis of description. So-called Claudian poets throughout Europe, removing any external purpose from description, occasioned much anxiety among eighteenthcentury aesthetic thinkers. Description, in its widest sense, up until the early eighteenth century was always auxiliary to another end (a guide, military use); in the work of a poet like Thomson, however, description claims to be exclusively representational. The post-Claudian backlash of the mid-eighteenth century, headed by G. E. Lessing’s Laocoön (1776),

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objects to poetry’s assumed function under such a descriptive aesthetic, claiming that descriptive art presents, mimetically but superfluously, something I can look out of my window to see.28 This ut pictura poesis debate echoes into Romanticism, which decides that it is not the job of poetry to describe, at least not for the sake of representing objects. Edmund Burke states this most explicitly, citing Kant’s call for art to provide an ‘understanding’ to compensate for the loss of the thing-initself. Burke, that is, demands that poetry ‘affect rather by sympathy than imitation; to display rather the effect of things on the mind of the speaker, or of others, than to present a clear idea of the things themselves’, adding: ‘We yield to sympathy what we refuse to description.’29 What Burke attempts in his Enquiry is the inclusion of description into a poetics, but only in so far as it serves another purpose – in this case, to give us an account of an inner state. Burke replaces a poetics of mere description for one where description itself is secondary, a means to arouse ‘strong and lively feelings’. I do not suggest that Clare read Lessing or Burke – he did, though, feel the pressure of the new antidescriptive aesthetic. His publisher’s urging him to write ‘more philosophically’, or Keats’s suggestion that his ‘Images from Nature are too much introduced without being called for by a particular sentiment’, are echoed constantly by close friends and critics alike. Clare’s work, particularly when read through Ashbery, constantly tends towards the descriptive per se, and his subject matter mostly gives the impression of being arbitrary – justified, often explicitly, by the simplest sentiment of all: ‘I love to see . . .’. The Burkean view of description is what Clare wrote against, and Ashbery’s reading of Clare is equally caught up in it: ‘The landscape has dull stretches, patches of repetition’ (OT, 11), says Ashbery, but this is explained and ultimately justified by Clare’s whole poetic philosophy: ‘the point is there is no point’ (23). Conventional modern ideas of description can be summed up in Paul Valéry’s conception: ‘The invasion of Literature by description was parallel to that of painting by landscape. A description is composed of sentences whose order one can generally reverse: I can describe this room by a series of clauses whose order is not important.’30 ‘Invasion’ here alludes not to Claudian landscape poetry, though it would apply to it, but rather to description’s proliferation in realist fiction. Gustave Flaubert’s static descriptions, for example, fit Valéry’s definition: He had his hair cut in bangs, like a cantor in the village church, and he had a gentle, timid look. He wasn’t broad in the shoulders, but his jacket with its black buttons seemed tight under the arms; and through the vents of his cuffs we could see red wrists that were clearly accustomed to being covered. His yellowish breeches were hiked up by his suspenders, and from them emerged

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a pair of blue-stockinged legs. He wore heavy shoes, hobnailed and badly shined.31

The details here are reversible and still, as Valéry’s conception demands, and are ordered to a logic that is arbitrarily spatial, running from top to bottom. Though we have come to think of such detailing as the essence of what it is to describe, it is not the only way of thinking about description. For in Clare, in spite of the landscape subject matter, scenes are such that any pictorial rendering is quickly seen to be impossible. This much is clear in ‘Emmonsails Heath in Winter’: I love to see the old heaths withered brake Mingle its crimpled leaves with furze & ling While the old Heron from the lonely lake Starts slow & flaps his melancholy wing & oddling crow in idle motions swing On the half rotten ash trees topmost twig Beside whose trunk the gipsey makes his bed Up flies the bouncing wood cock from the brig Where a black quagmire quakes beneath the tread The field fare chatters in the whistling thorn & for the awe round fields & closen rove & coy bumbarrels twenty in a drove Flit down the hedgerows in the frozen plain & hang on little twigs & start again.32

Though Clare is often seen as a poet of disconnection, his work is in fact radically connected; here, the brake ‘mingles’ with the furze, the heron sympathises with the ‘lonely lake’ by flapping his own ‘melancholly wing’, the gypsy is physically linked to the crow via the tree that draws Clare’s attention to him, there is a ‘drove’ of filially connected bumbarrels, and so on. These things are linked in such a way that the perception of the one causes the perception of the other. They are evidently perceptions and descriptions occurring in time. It is not that Clare loves to see this and this and this in a parataxis of impressions, but rather that he loves to see them in precisely this order. This is what Heaney refers to when noting ‘the inexorable one-thing-after-anotherness of the world’ in Clare’s vision.33 The movement should be seen as a narrative of perception; as Blackwood’s Magazine discerned at the time, Clare presents ‘a series of images all naturally arising, as it were, out of each other’.34 Description, however, lacking narrative’s unifying force, tends towards the infinite and chaotic (as Surrealism realised). To avoid such chaos, using the ballad as a model, Clare combines the two.35 Clare’s

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descriptions are often narrative in nature because what Clare describes, or more immediately what Clare wants to observe, are moving things, and the longer poems Ashbery discusses in Other Traditions, such as ‘Recollections After an Evening Walk’, ‘Boyhood Pleasures’, ‘The Flitting’ and The Shepherd’s Calendar, are primarily in the business of describing extended units of time, within which particular incidents and objects are observed very much in subordination to the temporal ‘subject’. The determining force in such poems is not, as Burke would have wanted, an underlying expression of Clare’s innermost feelings, but a more immediate pleasure in getting everything down, or at least remembering and composing it, as it happens as a narrative, one thing after another. Clare’s shorter lyrics are miniature anecdotes; even poems purely descriptive in their aims, where nothing happens in any conventional sense that the ballad would recognise, are unmistakably narrations. Here is the sonnet, ‘Hares at Play’: The birds are gone to bed the cows are still & sheep lie panting on each old mole hill & underneath the willows grey-green bough Like toil a resting – lies the fallow plough The timid hares throw daylights fears away On the lanes road to dust & dance & play Then dabble in the grain by nought deterred To lick the dew fall from the barleys beard Then out they sturt again & round the hill Like happy thoughts – dance – squat – & loiter still Till milking maidens in the early morn Gingle their yokes & sturt them in the corn Through well known beaten paths each nimbling hare Sturts quick as fear – & seeks its hidden lair.36

The time framework here, as in so much of Clare’s poetry, is the day; the narrative progresses in so far as it nears its end, the coming of a new morning. After a brief tableau setting the poem’s starting time, the poem narrates the habits of the hare over the course of the night. The narration takes its cue from ballad conventions; it is a strictly sequential, third-person and, by virtue of its heavy rhyming, musical story. Most interesting, however, is how the story pressures and transforms its description, or its own telling; because Clare is forced to relate a period of time in the sonnet, the details become of necessity sketchy. This sketchiness effects an impression of Clare trying to keep up: ‘dance – squat – and loiter still’. Gerard Genette has claimed the distinction between description and narrative to be ‘one of the major characteristics of our literary

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consciousness’.37 But we may also appeal here to Michel Beaujour’s distinction between two types of description. Beaujour discusses the essential difference between descriptive tableau (often seen as the only type of description) and description of a more dynamic type: while gardens are static and made up of simultaneous events, the working of a mechanism is motion, transfer of energy, a chain of causes and effects. In short, one would expect the description of a garden to be quite a different linguistic procedure from relating how a lawn mower (or a gardener) works.38

‘Hares at Play’, albeit beautifully and ambiguously, is a natural historian’s account of the nocturnal behaviour of hares. But the poem is also a mechanical account of this phenomenon. It is not a description of a landscape per se (if it were, the style of the first four lines would continue for the whole poem) but rather a description of how hares work – or, at least, how they play. Clare merges narrative with description, not in the conventional sense of combining atmosphere with action (which rather keeps them separate), but in what is essentially a form of chronography, a description of time. ‘Hares at Play’ is as much an account of Clare’s experience of the night and its mechanics as it is about what a hare ‘is’ in the natural historian’s terms. Clare does not simply fail to see the fixed character of things as variously conceived by Lessing, Burke and Coleridge. It is a gesture of defiance on his part to deny such fixity, whether in the shape of enclosure, taxonomy or punctuation, or of bourgeois, urban conceptions of ideal landscape. His mode is a technique, a rhetoric. Thomson represents landscapes from a distance, the natural historian seeks exhaustive information and Coleridge steps back into a meditational sphere of frozen time. For Clare, on the other hand, both distance and attention are paralysing, affecting his ability to move, to change angles, to observe other things and notice new incidents happening. He is much happier relating his adventures in discovery, physical or perceptual – the search, the finding, the closing in, the surprise. It is these aspects of Clare’s work that Ashbery highlights in his lecture. For Ashbery, Clare ‘is above all an instrument of telling’ (OT, 16). Rather than giving us disorder, Clare, read through Ashbery, orders his perceptions into stories. The major critical issue of ‘process’ in Ashbery’s poetry can be qualified through an analysis of this reading. The platitudes proliferating on the matter, such as Helen Vendler’s conception of Ashbery as ‘recording a unique interval of consciousness’, turning his attention from the world ‘to the processes themselves’, or another critic’s opinion that ‘inscribing a multiplicity of temporal forms,

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Ashbery’s poetry inscribes the multidimensionality of human reality’, are not illuminating of Ashbery’s work.39 There are important issues at stake with Ashberyan process, which need to be examined rather than vaguely asserted. The biggest of these, which many poets of the 1960s faced, is how such a poetics can avoid poetry ending up, in Roger Gilbert’s characterisation, ‘like Lewis Carroll’s map drawn on a scale of one to one’ – how poetry, that is, with an investment in radically mimetic aesthetic values, can retain meaning.40 For Ashbery, the issue of process is specifically tied to narration, as his observations on Gertrude Stein show: Stanzas in Meditation gives one the feeling of time passing, of things happening, of a ‘plot,’ though it would be difficult to say precisely what is going on . . . But it is usually not events which interest Miss Stein, rather it is their ‘way of happening’.41

Ashbery is concerned with far more than the reproduction of a vague ‘multidimensionality of human reality’. He himself is only slightly more specific when he notes that ‘the passage of time is becoming more and more the subject of my poetry,’ but the difference is crucial in clarifying Ashbery as a descriptive poet.42 For what Clare offers Ashbery, I hope to show now, is a particular descriptive mode that can accommodate such a ‘subject’. Jeremy Stick of Newsday provides a unique account of Ashberyan journalistic description on the back cover of Ashbery’s collection of art criticism, Reported Sightings: ‘Ashbery describes beautifully,’ he says, ‘but his description also functions as inquiry or retelling: in describing an image, he recounts the process of its making.’ An Ashberyan account of an object is simultaneously a description of process. Many poems in The Double Dream of Spring, such as ‘Evening in the Country’, ‘Summer’ and ‘Spring Day’, are exemplary attempts to recount the process of their images’ making. Here is the end of ‘Evening in the Country’: Light falls on your shoulders, as is its way, And the process of purification continues happily, Unimpeded, but has the motion started That is to quiver your head, send anxious beams Into the dusty corners of the rooms Eventually shoot out over the landscape In stars and bursts? For other than this we know nothing And space is a coffin, and the sky will put out the light. I see you eager in your wishing it the way We may join it, if it passes close enough: This sets the seal of distinction on the success or failure of your attempt.

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There is growing in that knowledge We may perhaps remain here, cautious yet free On the edge, as it rolls its unblinking chariot Into the vast open, the incredible violence and yielding Turmoil that is to be our route. (DDS, 34)

‘Evening in the Country’ depicts a movement from day to night, night to day. ‘Space is a coffin’ without ‘process’ for Ashbery, without the ‘growing in that knowledge’, the narrative movement of a ‘route’. In this, Ashbery partakes of a wider postmodern reappraisal of description, as typified by Alain Robbe-Grillet: ‘the whole interest of description [is] not the thing described, but in the very movement of the description.’43 Indeed, the Ashberyan scenic might resemble Charles Olson’s famous definition of landscape as ‘narrative; scene; event; climax; crisis; hero; development’, were it not for Ashbery’s abstraction of both place and past in favour of radical presence and movement per se.44 The interest of ‘Evening in the Country’ is in its movement from a static and ironically idealised description of the day (‘I am still completely happy’) to the realisation and ultimate acceptance of the dynamism and ‘turmoil’ of life. It is expressed in the transformation of the poem’s tone from general musing to the direct address of the immediate present. In the latter, Ashbery’s writing is akin to the situated conversationalism of Clare’s poems: ‘Have you begun to be in the context you feel . . . ?’; ‘I see you eager in your wishing it the way / We may join it, if it passes close enough’; ‘We may perhaps remain here, cautious yet free’ (34). The poem is one of process in so far as it registers a sentimental change, but it does much more than this. The poem registers and improvises process by a detailing, and by a narrative logic of scene, crisis and resolution (beginning, middle and end). The details of the poem are a long way from being ‘reversible’ as Valéry would have them, because the poem is the story of the details of an evening in the country. Ashbery’s late twentieth-century avant-garde milieu will, of course, always mean that the relationship between words and things – and thereby the nature of description – is less stable in his work than in Clare’s. What is important is how Ashbery is able to transplant Clare into this aesthetic milieu. Clare, unlike other Romantic poets, is already congenial to the inattentive Ashberyan mode. Clare’s uncertainty, his radical immanence and disordered poetics mean that, for Ashbery, Clare avoids the pitfalls of a quasi-religious, meditative Wordsworthian Romanticism that is more clearly at odds with Ashbery’s avant-gardism. Ashbery, though, is as much a poet of ideas as he is of things – that is, strangely not much of a poet of either.45 Just as Ashbery’s Clarean poetics overlooks the concretion of Clare’s work, equally, his Stevensian

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abstraction emphatically eschews all notion of the ‘idea’ in any sense Stevens would recognise. Ashbery is not out writing poems about badgers and robins’ nests, but no more is he writing notes towards a supreme fiction. Description, within Ashbery’s Clarean rhetoric of perception, is why; Ashbery, through a reading of Clare, is interested in a kind of middle way here, by constructing a poetics of time. * * * Three Poems is the culmination of Ashbery’s early work. One problem in discussing this multilayered volume is that its influences are so many; different critics variously suggest the importance of W. H. Auden’s The Sea and the Mirror, Blaise Pascal, Stein and French prose poetry, with Ashbery himself citing Clare’s natural history prose, de Chirico’s Hebdomeros and Thomas Traherne’s Centuries of Meditation. Ultimately, one must allow that the work contains a multitude of voices. In this sense alone, Ashbery’s 1972 volume seems a most unClarean work. Three Poems is also radically abstract and ungrounded – to all appearances lacking any phenomena. Because of its fundamentally meditational disposition, its contemplative abstraction, Three Poems clearly presents a challenge to a reading of Ashbery as a Clarean, descriptive poet of immanence. This is, however, why the work is central for plotting the trajectory of Ashbery’s career; in it, we see a perceptual immersion that occurs, paradoxically, in contemplation itself. Ashbery says that ‘the idea’ of Three Poems was that ‘the poetic form would be dissolved, in solution, and therefore create a much more . . . of a surrounding thing like the way one’s consciousness is surrounded by one’s thoughts.’46 In other words, the work presents consciousness immersed in its own machinations. Accordingly, the ‘things’ of Three Poems are ‘thoughts’, and its multiple voices can also be seen in these terms. The work is exemplary of Ashbery in that it presents a contemplative poetics that is not philosophical, and, most importantly, a poetry that can be meditational without relinquishing immanence. We can first distinguish between Ashbery’s ‘thoughts’ and the argumentative contemplative of a Coleridge or Emerson. This is easily done by looking at any passage from Three Poems: It seemed, just for a moment, that a new point had now been reached. It was not the time for digressions yet it made them inevitable, like a curtain at the end of an act. It brought you to a pass where turning back was unthinkable, and where further progress was possible only after it had been discussed at length, but which also outlawed discussion. Life became a pregnant silence, but it was understood that the silence was to lead nowhere. It became impossible to breathe in this constricted atmosphere. (TP, 62–3)

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In this send-up of philosophical expostulation, nothing is worked out; rather, new points of argumentation are seen ‘just for a moment’, before ‘digressions’ invariably crowd in. The content here is more akin to a story than the progression of a conventional argument; the poem’s movements are always forward, and are strangely physical rather than mental in nature. The reason for this is that Ashbery, unlike the Coleridgean thinker, is unable to stop time for his meditational convenience: ‘the one thing you want is to pause so as to puzzle all this out, but that is impossible’ (86). In Three Poems, ‘It makes sense to stand there, passing’ because ‘we and everything around us are moving forward continually’ (74). Ashbery’s objective in the work, therefore, rather than detachment or argumentative clarity, is some form of attachment – a fact set out at the beginning of the work: Force and mastery are required, they are ready in fact, but to use them deeply without excuses is a way of intermittent life, and the point was that the moments of awareness have to be continuous if they are to exist at all . . . I am to include everything: the furniture of this room, everyday expressions, as well as my rarest thoughts and dreams, so that you may never become aware of the scattered nature of it, and meanwhile you are it all, and my efforts are really directed to keeping myself attached, however dimly, to it as it rolls from view, like a river which is never really there because of moving on someplace. (14–15)

Such attachment to what is ‘moving on’ makes Ashbery’s poems, like Clare’s, ‘dispatches from the front’ (OT, 17). The moving on is always merely ‘someplace’ in Three Poems, however; aimless in every sense of the word. Though the volume’s second poem is called ‘The System’, there are no indications that such a structure is helpful in predicting the outcome of the argument: ‘How will it all turn out? What will the end be? But these are questions of an ignorant novice which you have forgotten about already’ (86). Such non-systematic continuity is a quality Ashbery admires in Clare’s longer poems, of which the ‘changing scene’ of The Shepherd’s Calendar, Clare’s vision of pastoral in the present tense, is perhaps Three Poems’ closest analogue. According to Ashbery, the ‘run-on couplets’ of Clare’s poem are ‘vivid’ merely as an ‘accumulation of particulars’ (OT, 20); ‘Unlike Wordsworth’s exalted rambles in The Prelude, [in Clare] there is no indication that all this is leading up to something,’ Ashbery says (OT, 17). Like The Shepherd’s Calendar, in which even a winter-frozen brook is seen to be in ‘chill delay’ rather than stasis, everything moves in Three Poems. Its meditational medium means that such dynamism is transformed from concrete and linear narrative into conceptual

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digression and contradictory progression. As Ashbery notes in an interview, Three Poems is ‘a series of contradictions, one after the other’.47 Contradiction, the volume’s method of proceeding, acts as a kind of dialectic gone wrong where, because of Ashbery’s investment in temporal description and the example of Clare, arguments are constantly lost in the course of Ashbery’s attention, sometimes to be contradicted, sometimes to be caught up with, rethought and displaced again in turn: Here it is that our sensuality can save us in extremis: the atmosphere of the day that event took place, the way the trees and buildings looked, what we said to the person who was both the bearer and fellow recipient of that message and what that person replied, words that were not words but sounds out of time, taken out of any external context in which their content would be recognizable – these facts have entered our consciousness once and for all, have spread through us even into our pores like a marvelous antidote to the cup that the next moment had already prepared and which, whether hemlock or nectar, could only have proved fatal because it was the next, bringing with it the unspoken message that motion could be accomplished only in time, that is in a preordained succession of moments which must carry us far from here, far from this impassive but real moment of understanding which may be the only one we shall ever know, even if it is merely the first of an implied infinite series. (76)

This passage not only effects argument-by-story through its fast reasoning; the sheer dimensions of its syntax mean the reader is forced to experience the sentence itself as time passing, rather than as a mere vehicle for concepts. It is this tumbling syntax that forms ‘the unspoken message that motion could be accomplished only in time’ of Three Poems. Concepts are no doubt important to the work, but these operate as mainly rhapsodic moments, or ‘sounds out of time’ within the ‘succession of moments’, rather than building blocks of argumentation. Even the poem’s central ‘message’, which broadly concerns why one should attend to the present moment, ‘falls on the ear like “special pleading” [because] it too is in due season’ (24). Even the most flexible concept contains forethought and the ‘risk of predicting’ (39) what ‘has to be rethought each second’ (61). It is this that Margueritte Murphy describes as ‘the unforeknowable movement of [Ashbery’s] prose’.48 The immersion in meditation, then, is an immersion in time. Objective or comprehensive argumentation fails because Ashbery’s work goes ironically ‘past the ideal rhythm of the spheres’ (6) and becomes engulfed back in the course of the present’s non-ideal rhythms. Importantly, this present is the time of writing: ‘He types like mad, composing as fast as he can type, which is fast. He barely thinks about what he’s doing,’ narrates Larissa MacFarquhar of Ashbery’s composition of the volume.49

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Three Poems is concerned with elucidating the moment of contemplation rather than arriving at its end: It is with some playfulness that we actually sit down to the business of mastering the many pauses and the abrupt, sharp accretions of regular being in the clotted sphere of today’s activities. As though this were just any old day. There is no need for setting out, to advertise one’s destination. All the facts are here and it remains only to use them in the right combinations, but that building will be the size of today, the rooms habitable and leading into one another in a lasting sequence, eternal and of the greatest timeliness. It is all that. But there was time for others, that were to have got under way, sequences that now can exist only in memory, for there were other times for them. Yet they really existed. For example a jagged kind of mood that comes at the end of the day. (53–4)

There is no need ‘to advertise one’s destination’, nor for ‘setting out’ a purpose. As the work says elsewhere, ‘the situation in which you find yourself . . . is always a new one and cannot be decoded with reference to an existing corpus of moral principles’ (114). This somewhat clichéd conviction clearly brings us back to the immediacy Ashbery admires in Clare’s work. However, the situation of Three Poems would not be recognised as such by Clare, whose world is quite differently conceived. In this, Ashbery returns us to Adorno, for whom mimesis is explicitly not a question of representing things. Adorno speaks of mimesis as a selfreflexive form able to rescue thought from the representative structures of exchange and substitution enforced by commodity capitalism: ‘Art is thus able to speak in itself. This is the realization through mimesis. Art’s expression is the antithesis of “expressing something,” ’ according to Adorno. Art is in some way identical to its own mimetic moment, and therefore, in a way that Three Poems demonstrates, able to operate alongside rather than violently on the world. For all his enthusiasm for Clarean immediacy, Ashbery reads Clare’s ‘now’ as a profoundly abstract category, present not because his poetry speaks of ‘something’, but because in doing so, in thinking through its description, it narrates the process of time in a universal sense. Ashbery says in his Clare lecture, speaking of his own poetry, that ‘ideas are also things’ (OT, 2). And so the Kantian manifold becomes transformed in Three Poems from phenomena into thought and composition itself, into a manifold of reflexivity: ‘Everything drops in before getting sorted out’ (12). In this sense, the economy of Ashbery’s anti-meditational meditational aesthetic, caught up in ‘the saw-toothed anomalies of time itself’ (9), builds on his broader poetics of inattention, as outlined in the introduction to this book; both are, in Ashbery’s

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description of Stein, ‘a way of happening’. Time means the work is based on a strange mixture of the phenomenal and the abstract, a mixture figured predominantly in the figure of the day: ‘Even now the sun is dropping below the horizon; a few moments ago it was still light enough to read but now it is no more, the printed characters swarm over the page to create an impressionistic blur’ (66). The day is the poem’s manifold in which the poet is immanent; the ‘open, moist, impregnable order of the day – kind, generous and protective – surrounds you’ (9). The whole volume, indeed, can be read as a register of thoughts occurring in a day, from morning to night. Ashbery even compares the human subject to the mayfly: ‘how could we know, any more than those insects whose life-span is a single day?’ (66). The work ends: As I thought about these things dusk began to invade my room. Soon the outlines of things began to grow blurred and I continued to think along wellrehearsed lines like something out of the past. Was there really nothing new under the sun? (116)

The Ecclesiastes allusion here takes on the drily literal meaning of the day. Ashbery said, in an interview just after the composition of Three Poems, that his poems set out to characterise the bunch of circumstances that they’re growing out of and a day might be said to be the basis for a poem, that one sits down to write a poem on a particular day and that’s the beginning of the poem – the fabric of it – and afternoon and night are further aspects of day that moves on.50

Three Poems relates such a story of the day, and in doing so abandons the trappings of argumentation in favour of ‘the plot that the number of your days concocts’ (105). Ashbery’s work figures immanence, then, in terms of contemplation. It is able to do so because Ashbery conceives of an immersion in thought itself, in correspondence to the way that Clare finds immediacy in his natural surroundings. The two converge in their privileging of the present moment, and its representation in story. ‘The music of all present’ is what is important to both poets, whether it be the sound of birds twittering or the machinery of thought. And this is ultimately where we must locate the influence of Clare on Ashbery’s work – in his inattention to any end or final vision in a poem, which is a heightened attention to what it is to be in the world, and to its time passing. * * * Three Poems is a major work and a crucial episode in Ashbery’s career. The finest example of Ashbery’s later description, 1979’s ‘Haunted

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Landscape’ (AWK, 80–2), will finally serve to give an indication of the effect of Three Poems’ transformations of Clarean aesthetics on Ashbery’s later work. Like many of Ashbery’s early poems, ‘Haunted Landscape’ takes up the convention of a mystery narrative. Though the work is preoccupied with ‘signs’ in landscape, such signs are radically destabilised by the introduction of time and change into the scene: Something brought them here. It was an outcropping of peace In the blurred afternoon slope on which so many picnickers Had left no trace. The hikers then always passed through And greeted you silently. And down in one corner Where the sweet william grew and a few other cheap plants The rhythm became strained, extenuated, as it petered out Among pots and watering cans and a trowel. There were no People but everywhere signs of their recent audible passage. (80)

The descriptive storytelling remains, as the opening location above is unexpectedly ‘uprooted to make way / For the new plains and mountains’ halfway through the poem, which is to be ‘extinguished’ in turn by the ocean. Place itself is displaced in the poem’s narrative. As in Ashbery’s earlier work, the message here, expressed in the poem’s final lines, ‘Time and the land are inseparable, // Linked forever,’ is reminiscent of Clarean aesthetics. However, while many Clarean traits remain in place in the poem, ‘Haunted Landscape’ has in fact entered another mode quite alien to Clare. The poem continues: something, some note or other gets lost, And we have this to look back on, not much, but a sign Of the petty ordering of our days as it was created and led us By the nose through itself, and now it has happened And we have it to look at, and have to look at it For the good it now possesses. (80)

While the argument of these lines is undoubtedly in sympathy with some of Clare’s aims, the practice of the poem has clearly left Clare behind, for reasons that I will suggest in the next chapter. While symbols are unnervingly mobile in the poem, they are none the less the means by which Ashbery intimates time passing, or the ‘great sense of what had been cast off / Along the way’. In so far as Ashbery’s medium has changed from description to symbolism, his style has detached itself from the immersive storytelling of Clare. Ashbery begins to install a distance between himself and Clarean rhetoric after Three Poems, taking up a

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more reflective standpoint on the implications of a poetics descriptive of time, tending to articulate rather than enact them. As a theme, the issue of time remains central to Ashbery’s work; we only need remember the crux of ‘Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror’: ‘Tomorrow is easy, but today is uncharted’ (SP, 72). The Clarean mechanics of arguably the most successful period in Ashbery’s work, however, has started to disappear by the time of volumes like Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975), As We Know (1979) and, finally, A Wave (1984). In The Double Dream of Spring and Three Poems, however, one can locate many of the aesthetic concerns and achievements of this later work. Reading this period of Ashbery’s career alongside its éminence grise allows us to analyse and value his descriptive poetics of time, and clarify ideas of him as a ‘poet of process’. To see that Clare and the early Ashbery, that is, are not just poets thrashing around in the ‘multiplicity of human experience’, but poets describing the ‘one-thing-after-anotherness’ of it, is to specify and explain, at least partly, the originality of Ashbery’s poetry.

Notes 1. Ashbery recalls first reading Clare ‘circa 1954 when [he] bought the Tibble edition of his poems’ (email to author, 13 March 2007). 2. James Fenton, ‘Getting Clare Clear’. 3. Tom Paulin (ed.), John Clare: Major Works, p. xxv. 4. Paulin, ‘The Writing Lark’, p. 5. 5. Ashbery recalls later that Clare’s journals were the impetus behind his resumption of prose poetry in this period (see John Shoptaw, On the Outside Looking Out, p. 129). 6. Quintillian, Institutio Oratoria, X.I.19, p. 13; Michael Worton and Judith Still (eds), Intertextuality: Theories and Practice, p. 7. 7. John Clare, The Shepherd’s Calendar, p. 21. 8. For a full account of this see Ben Hickman, ‘John Clare and the End of Description’. 9. For accounts of this phenomenon in the US, see especially Kevin Mattson, Intellectuals in Action: The Origins of the New Left and Radical Liberalism; and Andrew Hunt, ‘How New Was the New Left?’ 10. Ashbery wrote in 1966: ‘All poetry is against war and in favour of life, or else it isn’t poetry.’ For an account of Ashbery and Vietnam see David Herd, ‘Forms of Action’, in John Ashbery and American Poetry, pp. 93–143; and Stephen Paul Miller, Seventies Now: Culture as Surveillance, pp. 21–7. 11. Martin Jay, ‘Mimesis and Mimetology’, p. 32. 12. Theodor Adorno, Prisms, p. 31. 13. Ibid., p. 24. 14. Ibid., p. 36. 15. Ibid., p. 78.

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80 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

46. 47.

John Ashbery and English Poetry Roger Gilbert, Walks in the World, pp. 4–5. Cited in Mark Storey (ed.), John Clare: The Critical Heritage, p. 263. John Barrell, The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place, p. 161. Barrell, The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place, p. 188. John Clare, Poems of the Middle Period, vol. 5, p. 246. John Middleton Murry, John Clare and Other Studies, pp. 19–20. S. T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, vol. 1, p. 304. For the first, see ‘The Progress of Rhyme’; for the second, see any number of Clare’s bird nest poems; and for the third, see especially ‘The Lament of Swordy Well’. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A78/B103. Clare, Poems of the Middle Period, vol. 3, p. 458. Barrell, The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place, p. 166. Ashbery, ‘Frank O’Hara’s Question’, p. 23. G. E. Lessing, Laocoön, passim. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, pp. 157, 160. Paul Valéry, Œuvres, vol. 2, pp. 1219–20. His italics. Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, p. 4. Clare, Poems of Middle Period, vol. 4, p. 286. Seamus Heaney, ‘John Clare: A Bi-centenary Lecture’, p. 137. Cited in Storey, John Clare: The Critical Heritage, p. 229. The importance of ballads to Clare is noted by a number of critics. Tim Chilcott points out in an excellent discussion of the issue: ‘Poetry for the young Clare embodied two central features: it began both as story and as sound’ – that is, as balladry. Clare’s illiterate mother had a collection of ballads, as Clare also later would, while his father could apparently recite over a hundred by heart. Clare’s early work is especially indebted to folk and ballad traditions (Tim Chilcott, ‘A Real World & Doubting Mind’: A Critical Study of the Poetry of John Clare, p. 3. See also George Deacon, John Clare and the Folk Tradition, pp. 84–8). Clare, Poems of the Middle Period, vol. 4, pp. 233–4. Cited in Jeffrey Kittay, ‘Descriptive Limits’, p. 225. Michel Beaujour, ‘Some Paradoxes of Description’, p. 28. Helen Vendler, The Music of What Happens, p. 232; Mary E. Eichbauer, Poetry’s Self-Portrait, p. 118. Gilbert, Walks in the World, p. 6. Ashbery, ‘The Impossible’, p. 251. The phrase ‘way of happening’ originally occurs in Auden’s ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’. Janet Bloom and Robert Losada, ‘Craft Interview with John Ashbery’, p. 122. Ashbery’s emphasis. Cited in Philip Hamon, ‘Rhetorical Status of the Descriptive’, p. 24. Charles Olson, ‘Letter to Elaine Feinstein’, p. 400. Mary Kinzie has observed that ‘deceptively concrete details [in Ashbery] are not incorporations of the real but signals of something else,’ though she does not specify what exactly (Mary Kinzie, ‘Irreference: The Poetic Diction of John Ashbery, Part I’, pp. 268–9). Bloom and Losada, ‘Craft Interview with John Ashbery’, p. 126. Piotr Sommer, ‘An Interview in Warsaw’, p. 304.

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48. Margueritte Murphy, A Tradition of Subversion: The Prose Poem in English from Wilde to Ashbery, p. 172. 49. Larissa MacFarquhar, ‘Present Waking Life’, p. 92. 50. Bloom and Losada, ‘Craft Interview with John Ashbery’, p. 120.

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Chapter Three

‘Always articulating these preludes’: landscape, Wordsworth, ‘A Wave’ and after

The above discussion of Ashbery’s reading of Clare leaves problems unaccounted for and gaps to be filled. This is not surprising; it is not this book’s purpose to explain the challenges of Ashbery’s work away by reference to one ‘precursor’. Though we have made progress on accounts of Ashbery’s style as imitating a ‘multidimensionality of human reality’, one issue at stake with such statements, Ashbery’s supposed solipsism, is yet to be fully resolved. The reasons for this lie partly in Clare’s work, which, in its focus on perceptivity itself, often shows a poet alone in the world. Part of the purpose, then, of discussing Ashbery’s reading of Wordsworth, the modern ‘social’ poet par excellence, is to give Ashbery a fair run against the various charges and celebrations of his supposed solipsism and political detachment. There are two reasons for Ashbery’s move away from Clare. First, there is Ashbery’s often-mentioned accidental entrance into the cultural mainstream around 1976 with the laurels bestowed on Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. Writing landscape poems for the US Department of the Interior, as Ashbery did with ‘Pyrography’ in 1976, makes it clear that, at a certain point in the 1970s, Ashbery no longer shared Clare’s marginality, as he had when involved with the counter-cultural New American Poetry. Associated with an avant-garde, in the 1950s and 1960s Ashbery’s poetry carried with it a politics almost by default; though references to actual events pepper his early collections, there is ultimately an unproblematic decision not to attempt the kind of political content poets around him, from the Beats to Robert Lowell and Denise Levertov, had made central to their work.1 Form, as figures associated with Language poetry have appreciated, is what makes Ashbery’s early work politically interesting. As Ashbery becomes more famous, however, he increasingly wants to reinstate the social relevance that has diminished for him as a result of his style’s absorption into the main-

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stream. We find expressions of guilt in complicity throughout Ashbery’s work of the late 1970s: Not everyone can afford the luxury of Just being not alive, but being at the center, The perfumed, patterned centre. (‘Fantasia on The Nut-Brown Maid’, HD, 78) Sometimes I think we are being punished for the over-abundance Of things. (‘Litany’, AWK, 32) unfurled on the political front . . . The subtle hegemony Of guilt that loops you together. (‘Litany’, 41) In the occupied countries, You are raised to the statute of a god, no one Questions your work, its validity, all Are eager to support it, to give of themselves. (‘Litany’, 46)

Here, Ashbery aestheticises an anxiety that his own new-found authority and acceptance is analogous to American imperialism. Ashbery worries that his work, in becoming part of a dominant culture, has also ‘turned out to be mass-produced’ for ‘the blind empathy of a homeland’, as ‘Litany’ has it in 1979. In 1984’s A Wave, Ashbery’s anxieties come to a decisive head; if ‘Litany’, for example, makes statements of conscience as part of a broader act of contemplation, ‘A Wave’ is a poem, in its focus and intensity, of nothing but statements of conscience. Composition of ‘A Wave’ begins in November 1982 – that is, nearly two years into Ronald Reagan’s first presidential term (one can place the poem’s genesis at the beginning of Reagan and Carter’s campaigning) – and is worked on for the next year.2 The writing of the poem, then, occurs in the wake of what political science terms a realigning election, and amidst drastic changes to US domestic and foreign policy. Reagan’s ‘supply-side economics’ in the early 1980s meant, most visibly, an effective end of trade union power, the biggest tax cuts of the century, and massive increases in inequality with a continuing recession and high unemployment. Meanwhile, the Reagan administration became notorious overseas for its aggressive foreign policy, invading or illegally supporting anti-Communist forces throughout Central and Latin America, and heightening Cold War tensions with the biggest US military buildup since the Second World War (the most famous offshoot of which was

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the Strategic Defense Initiative, or ‘Star Wars’). In most of this, however, the conflicts of the Reagan years were fought, as many historians of the period note, on the ground of political rhetoric.3 Whether the enemy was the ‘L-word’ (liberalism) or the ‘Evil Empire’, ideologies were at stake in the period in rhetorical terms. Stephen Paul Miller, in a cultural history of the 1970s that is also, acrobatically, a study of Ashbery’s poetry, says: the forever young and vital conservatism of Ronald Reagan [means that] suddenly, conservatism is ‘happening’ . . . In the eighties, there is a wish simply, with a sixties power of suggestion appropriated by the sunny ideology of Reaganism, to will this wall of pre-sixties credences in to place. The real, as a total field, is commodified, with more self-consciousness than in the sixties.4

It is this climate, above all, that necessitates Ashbery’s move away from an isolated Clare towards a more unavoidably social poetry – that is, poetry social in content as well as form. ‘A Wave’ is a crisis poem reacting to the early Reagan years, modelled on that seminal modern crisis of political indecision, Wordsworth’s Revolutionary books of The Prelude. The well-rehearsed debate about Ashbery’s relationship with Romanticism, then, becomes important here. I have been discussing Clare as distinguished from Romanticism, and suggesting that Ashbery’s reading of Clare is an attempt to avoid certain Romantic assumptions. Clearly, however, not all of Ashbery’s work does avoid Romantic tropes. The leading advocate of the ‘late Romantic’ Ashbery is, of course, Harold Bloom, as we saw earlier. Bloom’s representations of Ashbery are idiosyncratic, but the central concern of Bloom’s writing on Ashbery, to get at the poet’s sense of identity, is well directed, and needs addressing. Bloom, indeed, makes useful points on the issue if we view his comments in the context of Ashbery’s move away from Clare as a poetic model. Particularly, Bloom recognises the conflict of Ashbery’s later work as the dilemma of ‘two spiritual temptations’: The first temptation will be productive of a rhetoric that puts it all in . . . The second temptation is gratified by ellipsis, thus leaving it all out . . . The road through to poetry for Stevens was a middle path of invention that he called ‘discovery,’ the finding rather than the imposition of order . . . [Ashbery] is at his best when he is neither re-vitalising proverbial wisdom nor barely evading ellipsis, but when he dares to write most directly in the idiom of Stevens.5

Using the terms set up in the last chapter, one might say that Ashbery’s mature work, while seeing the dangers of a poetics of ellipsis such as Clare’s isolated descriptive immanence, still has little desire to impose a symbolist poetics of authority. The middle path I will suggest will not

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be Stevens, however. Rather, in ‘A Wave’, Ashbery negotiates the two dangers of isolation and authority by enacting a crisis of conscience – a crisis of authority that simultaneously invests in authority – modelled on Wordsworth’s Prelude. This negotiation can be seen as a watershed between ‘early’ and ‘late’ Ashbery. * * * Accounts of Ashberyan landscape fall broadly into two categories: landscape as consciousness and landscape as structure. In Bonnie Costello’s Ashbery, for example, ‘consciousness becomes itself the landscape’; for Robert von Hallberg, on the other hand, landscaping is used to ‘single out purely relational isomorphisms that are abstracted from content’.6 In the former case, landscape is an essentially Romantic device for mapping mental phenomena; in the latter, Ashbery is said to explore power relations through the spatial medium of landscape. In ‘A Wave’, problems emerge with both these accounts, as we see from a passage near the beginning of the poem: As with rocks at low tide, a mixed surface is revealed, More detritus. Still, it is better this way Than to have to live through a sequence of events acknowledged In advance in order to get to a primitive statement. And the mind Is the beach on which the rocks pop up, just a neutral Support for them in their indignity. They explain The trials of our age, cleansing it of toxic Side-effects as it passes through their system. Reality. Explained. And for seconds We live in the same body, are a sibling again. I think all games and disciplines are contained here, Painting, as they go, dots and asterisks that We force into meanings that don’t concern us And so leave us behind. But there are no fractions, the world is an integer Like us, and like us it can neither stand wholly apart nor disappear. When one is young it seems like a very strange and safe place. But now that I have changed it feels merely odd, cold And full of interest. (W, 70–1)

Assumptions of static signification latent in the spatial metaphors of von Hallberg and others cannot explain the movement that has clearly, somehow or another, occurred within the ‘mixed surface’ of these two symbolic scenes. The solipsism implied in landscape-as-consciousness accounts of Ashbery’s work, on the other hand, is undermined by the outside interference that has evidently caused such a mixed surface. The first verse-paragraph emphasises the ideological ‘cleansing’ that occurs courtesy of ‘their system’, whereas the second suggests that we simply

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read too much into these things, into ‘meanings that don’t concern us’. The landscape that has just menacingly ‘explain[ed] / The trials of our age’, has therefore been changed to something merely ‘odd’ and ‘full of interest’. That is, accounts of mental Ashberyan landscapes can encompass their temporal flux, but are unable to relate such scenic instability to a larger social context, whereas the reverse is the case for structuralist critics like von Hallberg. The combination of these two strategies is what makes ‘A Wave’ unique and important. Wordsworth, as influence and counterpoint, can help us here. Wordsworth claims in the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads that ‘the power of the human imagination is sufficient to produce such changes even in our physical nature as might almost appear miraculous.’7 Wordsworth’s point is that supposedly ‘physical’ nature, expressed in poetry, is more revealing of the imagination than of physical nature itself. The Prelude, which describes its narrative of maturing self-awareness (‘the love of nature leading to the love of mankind’) through landscape symbolism, is only possible on such an assumption, which is built into the Romantic conception of metaphor. ‘A symbol’, says Coleridge, ‘always partakes of the reality which it renders intelligible; and while it enunciates the whole, abides itself as a living part in that unity of which it is the representative.’8 Poetry presents the ‘Natur-geist’ in the same way that Nature presents God; just as ‘Nature is God’s Art,’ Coleridge declares, poetry is Nature’s Art. Symbolism, therefore, both represents the spirit of Nature, and mirrors analogically the process of creation itself. Hence, because the process of symbolism (or work of the Imagination) duplicates the creative relationship between God and Nature, in addition to simply signifying Nature, a symbol is part of what it represents. The obvious consequence of such a theory is to make symbolism an essentially dramatic device. In Rousseau’s words: ‘Perhaps his system is false; but developing it, he has painted himself truly.’9 Thus, a symbol’s reference can be vague or contradictory, but can express, in its creation, an inner state. The symbol which signifies itself, which represents the state of the mind creating it, has many examples in The Prelude, the restless landscaping of the introduction enacting the impossibility of beginning the poem, and the disappointing anti-climactic scenes of ‘Crossing the Alps’ being two famous examples. None, however, is more extraordinary than the extended crises of conscience we witness in Wordsworth’s engagement with the French Revolution. In its constant vacillating between support for the various, often conflicting, ideological positions associated with the Revolution, the second of Wordsworth’s ‘Residence in France’ books is English poetry’s great dialectic of landscape. The Prelude’s ending, which abandons considerations of

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Revolutionary France, proves that escape rather than decision is the only possible resolution to the conflicts of the Revolutionary books – to the incessant rhythm of metaphorical political landscapes that are made, doubted, refuted, withdrawn and provisionally replaced, to be doubted again in turn. In Book Ten, the Revolutionary ‘patriot’ (9: 124; 1805 text) of Book Nine, Wordsworth has become the conflicted onlooker. In the ‘desolation and dismay’ following Louis XVI’s execution, Wordsworth fights to keep the faith: ‘Yet did I grieve, nor only grieved, but thought / Of opposition and of remedies’ (129–30), he says, and such counter-arguments are offered. The constant rhythm of the narrative, wavering back and forth between belief and faithlessness, hope and fear, begins to assert itself as Britain declares war: All else was progress on that self-same path On which, with a diversity of pace, I had been travelling; this a stride at once Into another region. True it is, ’Twas not concealed with what ungracious eyes Our native rulers from the very first Had looked upon regenerated France, Nor had I doubted that this day would come. But in such contemplation I had thought Of general interests only beyond this Had never once foretasted the event. Now had I other business for I felt The ravage of this most unnatural strife In my own heart; there lay it like a weight At enmity with all the tenderest springs Of my enjoyments. I, who with the breeze Had played, a green leaf on the blessed tree Of my beloved country; nor had wished For happier fortune than to wither there Now from my pleasant station was cut off And tossed about in whirlwinds. (234–59)

Political and topographical ‘country’ are so interlinked here as to be interdependent, with Wordsworth’s political development a constant ‘progress on that self-same path’ to ‘another region’. The poet progresses through his crisis in so far as he traverses the path of his own metaphors. The subject of this part of The Prelude is not so much the French Revolution, Enlightenment ideals or English anti-Jacobinism, but rather the vacillating movement between these competing arguments – that is, the subjective condition of wavering, a constant self-scrutiny and revision of metaphorical adequacy.

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Even if we overlook the imagery which The Prelude and ‘A Wave’ obviously share, the connections between the two poems are striking. Ashbery has commented on the role of landscape in his poems: It could mean a portion of the world – with its people, objects, ideas – that is visible or present to me at a given moment . . . At other times it could be merely an abstract field of possibilities, a potentiality which the poem sets out to explore.10

Ashbery’s landscapes are frequently a combination of both these things – that is, used to mean ‘people, objects, ideas’ in the context of ‘a potentiality which the poem sets out to explore’. The excerpt from ‘A Wave’ quoted above, for example, demonstrates such a responsiveness to its own metaphorising: ‘We force’ the landscape ‘into meanings that don’t concern us’. Consciousness of a metaphor’s construction becomes paramount. The affinities between The Prelude’s vacillations and the wavering rhythm of Ashbery’s long poem are visible within this responsiveness. Fluid topographical awareness is the process ‘A Wave’ both is and undergoes: Moving on we approached the top Of the thing, only it was dark and no one could see, Only somebody said it was a miracle we had gotten past the Previous phase, now faced with each other’s conflicting Wishes and the hope for a certain peace, so this would be Our box and we would stay in it for as long As we found it comfortable, for the broken desires Inside were as nothing to the steeply shelving terrain outside, And morning would arrange everything. So my first impulse Came, stayed awhile, and left, leaving behind Nothing of itself, no whisper. The days now move From left to right and back across the stage and no one Notices anything unusual. Meanwhile I have turned back Into that dream of rubble that was the city of our starting out. No one advised me; the great tenuous clouds of the desert Sky visit it and they barely touch, so pleasing in the Immense solitude are the tracks of those who wander and continue On their route, certain that day will end soon and that night will then fall. But behind what looks like heaps of slag the peril Consists in explaining everything too evenly. (W, 73–4)

Clearly, Wordsworth’s specific landscape elements are more locatable than Ashbery’s, but the metaphoric role of the scenes is almost identical. In a long poem, Ashbery says, ‘one’s mind changes during the course of the

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writing; the changes are reflected in the poem, give it a diversity it wouldn’t otherwise have.’11 Though most of the movements of ‘A Wave’ are slower and more drawn out than the rapid wavering that occurs here, this passage is typical. The vigilant monitoring of ‘phases’ or how the ‘days now move’ is an attention to the revisions and re-revisions of the landscape itself. The ‘steeply shelving terrain outside’, ‘one’s first impulse’, is overcome by recourse to the ‘immense solitude’ of ‘that dream of rubble . . . the desert’ which is, in turn, rightly criticised for ‘explaining everything too evenly’. It is easy to see this heightened attention to landscape in 1984 as motivated by the shifting and shifty global geopolitics being orchestrated by Reagan in the early 1980s: the Iran-Contra affair was already secretly under way, while a raft of misleading information had just been given to the US public over the 1983 invasion of Grenada and other places of which the population had, for the most part, never heard. Christopher Middleton has suggested that, in ‘A Wave’, ‘Metaphors . . . crystallise as they expand perceptions in any given sequence of variables, and they are key moments in the timing of the vocal changes.’12 Unlike the ‘unmoved mover’ of traditional symbolism (in Verlaine’s description of Baudelaire), Ashbery offers a running commentary on the metaphors of ‘A Wave’.13 The problem is that, because all interpretations of symbols can only be offered in the form of more symbols, metaphors ‘expand as they crystallise’, giving rise to further metaphor just as their point has apparently been made: So the voluminous past Accepts, recycles our claims to present consideration And the urban landscape is once again untroubled, smooth As wax. As soon as the oddity is flushed out It becomes monumental and anxious once again, looking Down on our lives as from a baroque pinnacle and not the Mosquito that was here twenty minutes ago. The past absconds With our fortunes just as we were rounding a major Bend in the swollen river; not to see ahead Becomes the only predicament when what Might be sunken there is mentioned only In crabbed allusions but will be back tomorrow. It takes only a minute revision, and see – the thing Is there in all its interested variegatedness, With prospects and walks curling away, never to be followed, A civilised concern, a never being alone. (78)

The meanings of the poem’s landscapes are unforeseeable, ‘never to be followed’. The poem, that is, fails to resolve itself into anything beyond

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its ‘abstract field of possibilities’. The point, to adapt Marjorie Perloff’s term of indeterminacy, is that the possibilities here are not allowed to terminate, which is precisely what the passage above thematises (it is part of what it represents): ‘it takes only a minute revision.’ * * * Joan Dayan summarises ‘A Wave’ as ‘Ashbery’s most startling chronicle of what it is like to think thought through and thereby write a poem that remembers itself’.14 Incomplete as this sounds, the current discussion is yet to go fully beyond it. Given the manifestly political nature of its metaphors, there are more important issues at stake in ‘A Wave’ than ‘what it is like to think thought through’.15 ‘A Wave’ is a challenge to certain presuppositions regarding the nature of thought in the first place: for the tender blur Of the setting to mean something words must be ejected bodily, A certain crispness be avoided in favour of a density Of strutted opinion doomed to wilt into oblivion: not too linear Nor yet too puffed and remote. Then the advantage of Sinking in oneself, crashing through the skylight of one’s own Received opinions redirects the maze, setting up significant Erections of its own at chosen corners, like gibbets, And through this the mesmerizing plan of the landscape becomes, At last, apparent. (W, 69–70)

‘A Wave’ insists that thought is more than simply a matter of isolated mental processes. Emphasised throughout the poem is the paradoxical otherness of ‘one’s own received opinions’. Contrary to assumptions critics usually make about Ashbery’s work, ‘A Wave’ socialises thinking; thoughts are one’s own, but received, and subsequently manipulated, from elsewhere (‘it only takes a minute revision’). The poem is dominated by the need to make ‘the mesmerizing plan of the landscape . . . apparent’ in a way that Ashbery’s earlier work is not. Where ‘The Skaters’ delights in its immersion in external discourse, ‘A Wave’ is tortured by such immediacy; where the arguments of Three Poems willingly ebb and flow in the vicissitudes of time, in ‘A Wave’ they are desperately clutched for a sense of permanence. Unlike Ashbery’s earlier work, that is, ‘A Wave’ intervenes in its own operations, ‘setting up significant / Erections of its own at chosen corners’ to get a handle on the unwieldy and external forces operating in its situation. There is irony here, however, because for Ashbery there is still something suspect about ‘redirect[ing] the maze’, about interpreting or deconstructing the world. As we have seen, the landscapes of ‘A Wave’ have a tendency to become too ‘smooth’, too explained. A search for

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objective, disinterested significance is therefore staged by Ashbery. The poem explores the tension between two poetics – the crisis consequent on a landscape poem that attempts a broadly symbolist ordering of the world, but that also wishes to emphasise the otherness of thought and subjectivity’s involvement in the ‘maze’ of non-subjective symbolism. If ‘A Wave’ is a crisis of political conscience, it is complicated by the problems of being implicated in the discourse of ‘strutted opinion’. Wordsworth can illuminate this crisis. The French Revolution was, and is in The Prelude, ‘par excellence, a sequence of political action represented by styles or traditions of political rhetoric’, in the words of one historian of the period.16 In the context of this rhetoric, Alan Liu interprets the defence mechanism of Wordsworth’s Revolutionary books: a historically alienated nature makes possible the new, individual authority of the self by ‘quoting’ collective allusion according to process exactly like Bloom’s apophrades: as if collective allusion were really an allusion to the poet himself.17

As if, that is, individual authority were ‘one’s own received opinions’. The poet’s authority, as I have suggested, is dramatically undermined by such a process. Wordsworth, unnerved by the freedom to ‘fix my habitation where I will’ on returning to the Lake District at the very beginning of The Prelude, hopes that ‘Invigorating thoughts from former years / Might fix the wavering balance of my mind’ (1: 649–50). The poem’s ending, a return to its beginning, meanwhile, restores the poet’s self by rejecting the freedom of Revolutionary rationalism, in favour of the relatively firm foundations of monarchy, religion and childhood. We see Wordsworth’s need for such refuge in the Lake District landscape of Book Ten, where the poet learns of Robespierre’s death. Just before the news, Wordsworth is moving towards a resolution of conflicting rhetorics and landscapes. The ‘small Village’ in the Lake District that Wordsworth returns to, with its ‘far-secluded privacy’, ‘smooth sands’, ‘distant prospects’ and ‘mountain tops, / In one inseparable glory clad’ (473–80), represents everything Wordsworth yearns for that the French Revolution cannot give. The calm burial ground of an old schoolmaster is then contrasted with the killing fields of France, and a local chapel set explicitly at a distance from the French mêlée. Wordsworth, that is, has become able to relinquish some of his investment in Revolutionary France due to its excesses, and becalm himself. The scene does not last long, however:

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Not far from this still ruin all the plain Was spotted with a variegated crowd Of coaches, wains, and travellers, horse and foot, Wading beneath the conduct of their guide In loose procession through the shallow stream Of inland water; the great sea meanwhile Was at a safe distance, far retired. I paused, Unwilling to proceed, the scene appeared So gay and cheerful, when a traveller Chancing to pass, I carelessly inquired If any news were stirring; he replied In the familiar language of the day That, Robespierre was dead – nor was a doubt, On further question, left within my mind But that the tidings were substantial truth; That he and his supporters all were fallen. (524–39; Wordsworth’s italics)

Wordsworth is anxious to keep ‘the great sea’ of Revolutionary France ‘at a safe distance’ in this landscape. The self-consciousness of the scene’s significance then manifests itself; the poet is ‘Unwilling to proceed, the scene appeared / So gay and cheerful’. Wordsworth knows, at the time of writing, that the peace he has found in the acceptance of failure will be obliterated by new hope at Robespierre’s death. And so it is: these ‘tidings’ bring the ‘sea’ back, as the appealing ‘smooth sands’ of the scene’s opening are now ‘beat with thundering hoofs’: ‘In wantonness of heart, a joyous crew / Of schoolboys hastening to their distant home / Along the margin of the moonlight sea – / We beat with thundering hoofs the level sand’ (564–7). Predictably thereafter, the cycle begins again, with renewed enthusiasm for utopian landscape and new disappointment at its impossibility. Abandoning traditional foundations, the French Revolution challenges Wordsworth’s identity. Lost in uncontrollable ideological symbols and rhetoric, Wordsworth is only eventually restored by recourse to a proven individualism that is crucially seen as personally created, in contrast to the Revolutionary arguments about individual ‘liberté’, which take place in a political sphere.18 It is Nature that, for Wordsworth, as for Rousseau, is the end of metaphor, rhetoric and duplicity – that is, an end to wavering, and a reinstatement of the strong foundation where the self is constantly in the presence of truth. Dramatic irony is so crucial in the Revolutionary books because it undercuts all The Prelude’s episodes until Wordsworth’s final ‘restoration’ in Grasmere. In the ‘glad preamble’ we know by the weight of the book in our hands that the writer’s block is overcome; and in the Revolutionary books we are constantly reminded by Wordsworth that this is all being told by an individual

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no longer in such a crisis. We must infer that Book Ten’s circular argumentation, its habit of constantly refuting itself, must be resolved by something outside ideologies associated with the Revolution for the poem to exist (the poem’s opening, chronologically in the future, is not subject to such a crisis). This irony is central to the poetry of failure that The Prelude emphatically is. Irony subsumes and undermines all symbols, which always therefore disappoint. Such an approach is possible because the final resolution represents itself as having no metaphors in its argument, as Wordsworth instead recognises the priority and last word of Nature. ‘A Wave’ sets out, like The Prelude, to discover ‘how our landscape came to be as it is today’ (W, 68). In the beginning, this is a landscape seemingly too close to comprehend: ‘Partially out of focus, some of it too near, the middle distance / A haven of serenity and unreachable’. The utopian irony of the poem’s opening lines makes the problems of a simple immersion in immediate experience clear: To pass through pain and not know it. A car door slamming in the night. To emerge on an invisible terrain. (68)

In such a condition, Ashbery goes on to say, ‘none stand with you as you mope and thrash your way through time’ (68). Ashbery’s account of landscape, therefore, attempts to go beyond an invisible, ideal terrain, and account for interference: ‘It takes only a minute revision, and see – the thing / Is there in all its interested variegatedness, / With prospects and walks curling away, never to be followed’ (78). It is this emphasis on recognising the landscape’s ‘interested’ meaning, or its vested interest, that calls for the constantly expanding and revisited landscapes outlined above. Landscapes, in ‘setting up significant / Erections of its own at chosen corners’, can transcend the immediate and reveal social meaning, making them ‘at last, apparent’. The tempting ‘invisible terrain’ that ‘passes through you’ is rejected for a visible, significant landscape seen from a distance: . . . those moving forward toward us from the other end of the bridge Are defending, not welcoming us to, the place of power, A hill ringed with low, ridgelike fortifications. Somebody better prepared crosses over, he or she will get the same Cold reception. (74)

Observed holistically, populated landscapes like these are able to intimate a ‘place of power’, or the political structures inhering in our

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landscapes. In rejecting an ‘invisible terrain’, Ashbery implies, ‘Our story is no longer alone’ (69). The upshot of this new vigilance is an increase in the authority Ashbery attempts to wield over his work. Like The Prelude, which rejects the multiple rhetorics and symbols associated with the French Revolution for the single, present voice of Nature, ‘A Wave’, in seeking to allow for ‘interested variegatedness’ of its landscapes, evinces a suspicion of all external discourse. Being ‘at the centre of a moan that did not issue from me’ (80) is something that must be overcome by the poet. This is in marked contrast to Ashbery’s earlier long works. In opposition to the polyphony of Ashbery’s intertextual early poetry, from the radical bricolage of ‘Europe’ to Three Poems’ carnival of voices, ‘A Wave’ is marked by the continuity of a single register. Three Poems freewheels; ‘A Wave’ frets and reviews itself (it is, unsurprisingly, Ashbery’s most revised poem). In Three Poems, as in ‘The Skaters’, Ashbery revels in being knocked about by the poem’s various sources, delighting in going from philosophical registers to journalese, from Christian folk spirituals to Sir Thomas Browne, happy to ‘let them be inflicted on and off you’ (TP, 9). A mixture of rhetorics, arguments, symbolisms and clichés all make up an undoubted heteroglossia in ‘A Wave’, but there is now an open and self-conscious attempt at mediation. ‘A Wave’, in a certain way, is not an intertextual poem. It does not enjoy the crowding of political duplicity and ideological rhetoric: ‘By so many systems / As we are involved in, by just so many / Are we set free on an ocean of language that comes to be / Part of us, as though we could ever get away’ (W, 71). What Ashbery’s poem seems to do, in a similar way to The Prelude, is accept the essential and inescapable insidiousness of all ‘systems’, and thence work within a poetics of individual failure. The poem, that is, presents the poet as defeated by history, ‘neither humble nor proud, frei aber einsam [free but alone]’ (87). Many critics, not always consciously, have politicised Ashbery along these lines. Norman Finkelstein’s survey of American poetry’s utopian visions, The Utopian Moment, suggests that Ashbery talks of political frustration rather than encouraging political action, refusing to ‘challenge bourgeois modes of discourse’, and choosing instead to ‘imply and sometimes openly declare that a vision of or even a desire for perfection has been stifled’ in him.19 Keith Cohen’s essay ‘Ashbery’s Dismantling of Bourgeois Discourse’, though noting Ashbery’s attack on ‘the glibness, deceitfulness, and vapidity of bourgeois discourse’, ultimately lauds Ashbery’s non-committal voice: ‘Ashbery always makes us aware that there is a subject speaking, collective or individual . . . It is not monopoly capitalism, but, rather, as in ventriloquism, a subject using that voice,

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speaking that ideology, as though it were his own.’20 Ashbery, likewise, suggests that the dialectical movement of landscape symbolism in ‘A Wave’, which is always the vehicle of failure, is enough in itself to deal with such ‘discourse’: perhaps it’s too late for anything like the overhaul That seemed called for, earlier, but whose initiative Was it after all? I mean I don’t mind staying here A little longer, sitting quietly under a tree, if all this Is going to clear up by itself anyway. There is no indication this will happen, But I don’t mind. I feel at peace with the part of myself That questioned this other, easygoing side, chafed it To a knotted rope of guesswork looming out of storms And darkness and proceeding on its way into nowhere Barely muttering. (88–9)

There is irony in this ‘peace’, and like all the movements of the poem, the argument in favour of resignation is eventually disputed anyway. What I want to argue, though, is that this easygoing side of Ashbery, a hallmark of his later poetry, is increasingly employed outside of a dialectical structure that foils any suggestions of apathy. Looking at the poem’s ending, as ending, is revealing in this respect. ‘A Wave’ concludes: Always, a few errands Summon us periodically from the room of our forethought And that is a good thing. And such attentiveness Besides! Almost more than anybody could bring to anything, But we managed it, and with a good grace, too. Nobody Is going to hold that against us. But since you bring up the question I will say I am not unhappy to place myself entirely At your disposal temporarily. Much that had drained out of living Returns, in those moments, mounting the little capillaries Of polite questions and seeming concern. I want it back. And though that other question that I asked and can’t Remember any more is going to move still farther upward, casting Its shadow enormously over where I remain, I can’t see it. Enough to know that I shall have answered for myself soon, Be led away for further questioning and later returned To the amazingly quiet room in which all my life has been spent. It comes and goes; the walls, like veils, are never the same. Yet the thirst remains identical, always to be entertained And marveled at. And it is finally we who break it off, Speed the departing guest, lest any question remain Unasked, and thereby unanswered. Please, it almost

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Seems to say, take me with you, I’m old enough. Exactly. And so each of us has to remain alone, conscious of each other Until the day when war absolves us of our differences. We’ll Stay in touch. So they have it, all the time. But all was strange. (89)

It is easy to read this as going against the grain of Wordsworth’s ‘Conclusion’, against any restoration of imagination. As we have witnessed, Wordsworth’s resolution consists predominantly in the discovery that Nature transcends symbolism and therefore political rhetoric. Ashbery clearly offers no such solution to the problems of his poem. The ending above seems, mainly, to continue the wavering of meaning that marks the rest of the poem: still ‘that other question . . . comes and goes.’ Words like ‘though’, ‘yet’ and ‘but’ remain the major determining elements here. Even the final line, inverting what has apparently been the poet’s own gesture of goodbye, continues the conflict between individual utterance and external discourse to the end (‘So they have it, all the time’), while the concluding words posit anything but a resolution: ‘all was strange.’ But is this really the absence of an ending? The final words are certainly non-committal, but this does not mean they do not sum up. This is simply a type of conclusion; what wins out in the end is the continuation of the poem itself. The conclusion, resolving none of the poem’s contradictions, transcends them by referring to an external – it is simply that in Ashbery’s case, rather than a quasi-religious connection with Nature, this outside force is a certain style. It is tempting to suggest that nothing establishes itself in ‘A Wave’, but in this ending we in fact have a resolution in what one might call ‘typical Ashbery’: the elliptical, strangely beautiful non-concluding conclusion. The poem escapes the crisis of opinion by taking refuge in this style. If the symbol is part of what it represents, then style is part of the content, and in this case, the conclusion – what is finally affirmed. If it is hard to imagine a Wordsworthian epiphany of self in the poem, it is not difficult to sense the dominance of that mode of writing which would ultimately become known as ‘late Ashbery’. Politics is ultimately elided in favour of stylistics; ‘A Wave’ aestheticises political failure to the point that, in his later work, the aesthetic engulfs it. The emphasis on continuation in Ashbery’s ending is prophetic (and all the more so in Ashbery’s first Selected Poems, which ‘A Wave’ concludes) of the subsequent continuation and ultimate carrying out of this style in Ashbery’s next volumes. We can see how, after ‘A Wave’, Ashbery enters into a conservativism that, if not of a similar nature to Wordsworth’s, is at least akin to its structure of withdrawal. Ashbery’s later poetry appropriates social

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and political discourse, the subject of radical intertextuality in his early work, to the single marginalised voice of individual disappointment in the face of political disaster. Clearly, one cannot claim that poetry is ever likely directly to defend workers’ rights or to stop mass murder in Central America. Ashbery is, however, in his particular poetry of failure, symptomatic of the failure of liberalism in America – or, much more importantly, the victory of neoliberalism. Ashbery’s post-‘Wave’ approach to Reaganism, the end of the hopes of the 1960s, aestheticises a reaction to it based on an irony of personal resignation. It must therefore be seen as part, however minute, of the explanation for why Reagan was allowed to transform American politics despite long periods of massive unpopularity and ineptitude, why it became possible to call the Washington Consensus a consensus at all, and why political action, as opposed to political elegy, has been out of fashion for the past three decades. * * * ‘A Wave’ is possibly Ashbery’s greatest long poem. The originality of its metaphoric method, the dynamism of its engagement with social discourse, and the intensity of its vision of individual conflict with political reality make it one of the most important American poems of the late twentieth century. The significance of these aspects has hopefully been made clear by now, but in the preceding argument a number of unsubstantiated claims regarding the problems of the poem have been made as well. My aim here finally is to explain these conclusions by reading the poem in what is, I think, its most significant context: the work that comes after it.21 A few final words on ‘A Wave’ itself are necessary first. Firstly, it must be said that, though the poem represents a reading of the past, of Wordsworth, ‘A Wave’ gains much of its effects of urgency from the fact that no poem like it had ever been written before. Ashbery himself had just written Shadow Train, and his most recent long poems had been ‘Fantasia on The Nut-Brown Maid’ and the wonderfully desultory ‘Litany’. The dramatic power of ‘A Wave’, in comparison to these works, is unmistakable. In the intensity of its symbolic energy and selfscrutiny, the poem constantly refers us back to the historical moment of its production, in spite of the generality of its imagery. Neither Houseboat Days, As We Know or Shadow Train does so, nor indeed do they attempt to. ‘A Wave’, though, does not just represent the pained failure of the poet in the face of a crisis of conscience; it also carries his triumph. The consolidation of the poem’s poetic style, tone and voice does occur in the very unresolved, dialectical play of rhetoric the poem

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effects, but this only becomes apparent when seen in the context of Ashbery’s later collections and the continuation of this style. Ashbery settles, not, like The Prelude, into a consolation in Nature, but, after ‘A Wave’, into a crystallisation of this inconclusive style, which of course implies its own acceptance of conflict. April Galleons, published in 1987, occupies a unique position in Ashbery’s career. One closes Ashbery’s 1985 Selected Poems on ‘A Wave’, and begins the 2007 Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems with ‘Vetiver’, the first poem of April Galleons. In retrospect, the book documents a key moment in the story of Ashbery’s changing relationship with the avant-garde. April Galleons was published in the same year as Charles Bernstein’s The Sophist and Lyn Hejinian’s My Life, and a year after Ron Silliman’s groundbreaking collection of theory from Language poets, In the American Tree. Despite the influence Ashbery exerted on all three books, there can be no doubt that his new collection was operating in a different sphere, and in this context the politics of ‘late Ashbery’ are most visible. As I have been arguing, Ashbery’s subjecthood is such in ‘A Wave’ that the poem attempts to be representational; the poem describes, dramatises and relies for its beauty on individual but general failure. Language poetry, on the other hand, attempts to deconstruct what it perceives to be the bourgeois subject, and to go beyond representational aesthetics. Language poetry recognises that the danger of being a representative bourgeois liberal citizen in the time of Reagan is a recipe not only for inaction, but also for a celebration of individual marginalisation that risks aestheticising the political system over which it agonises. The mode of ‘A Wave’, with its anxious revisions of ideological positions, gives the poem a breadth – indeed, a diligence – that makes these dangers vivid. The problem for Ashbery afterwards is that, in building on its stylistic achievements, a foundation emerges that undermines the restless rethinking and unstable standpoint that make ‘A Wave’ so original. April Galleons introduces to Ashbery’s work a surprising continuation. This is the paradoxical division we feel between the Selected Poems and the Selected Later Poems. Certain poems from April Galleons are so much in the style of ‘A Wave’ that they read like outtakes. Take, for example, the title poem: Something was burning. And besides, At the far end of the room a discredited waltz Was alive and reciting tales of the conquerors And their lilies – is all of life thus A tepid housewarming? And where do the scraps Of meaning come from? Obviously,

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It was time to be off, in another Direction, towards marshlands and cold, scrolled Names of cities that sound as though they existed, But never had. I could see the scow Like a nail file pointed at the pleasures Of the great open sea, that it would stop for me, That you and I should sample the disjointedness Of a far-from-level deck, and then return, some day. (AG, 95)

Even John Shoptaw, who is not unsympathetic to April Galleons, sees the volume as part of Ashbery’s ‘wave-phase’.22 In the collection, however, by virtue of its very continuation of the ‘Wave’ mode, Ashbery’s poetry has visibly ceased to waver, to revise itself restlessly, instead settling on a style that feels in some way conclusive. In settling into certain aspects of A Wave’s manner, Ashbery now inevitably works towards quite different, apolitical ends. We see this in some of the poems in April Galleons that appear to be in dialogue with ‘A Wave’. ‘Becalmed on Strange Waters’, as its title implies, continues the earlier poem whilst exploring the possibility that its issues have been resolved. The poem is blasé about conflicting messages: ‘In the presence of both, each mistook / The other’s sincerity for an elaborate plot. / And perhaps something like that did occur – who knows?’ Here, the symbolical tensions of ‘A Wave’ are implied to have been misguided, and are dismissed. ‘We smile at these’ squabbles now, writes Ashbery, Thinking them matter for a child’s euphuistic Tale of what goes on in the morning, After everyone but the cat has left. But can you See otherwise? O ecstatic Receiver of what’s there to be received, How we belabor thee, how much better To wait and to prepare our waiting For the grand rush, the mass of detail Still compacted in the excitement that lies ahead, Like a Japanese paper flower. (AG, 57)

The poet is indeed ‘becalmed’ here. His previous urgency is parodied as child’s play, while conflict is characterised as something to be enjoyed, ‘compacted in the excitement that lies ahead’. The calmness is also embodied in a decision to ‘wait and prepare our waiting’ in contrast to the dramatic presence of ‘A Wave’. It seems that April Galleons is partly a matter of relinquishing certain aspects of the adopted aesthetic of ‘A Wave’. This new stance is, though, implicit in Ashbery’s Wordsworthian poetics of failure. Laura Quinney’s The Poetics of Disappointment,

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which discusses both poets, describes the condition of disappointment as an aesthetic of failure without consolation, and treats Ashbery suggestively for our purposes here. Unlike melancholy or disillusionment, disappointment is a comfortless state of affairs. Ashbery does not address [Quinney writes] creative or hopeful versions of Romanticism. He is preoccupied with the psychological theme of Wordsworth’s crisis lyrics, namely, the failure of ‘genial spirits’, or the experience of ontological disappointment. In this bleak version of Romanticism, disappointment remains unrepaired by a therapeutic resolution.23

The link between failure and irresolution is important here, and it is clear how Quinney’s poetics applies to ‘A Wave’. According to Quinney, when Ashbery is involved in such a poetic wavering of intent, he ‘does not congratulate himself on growing wiser or throwing off an illusion’.24 The lesser emotion of ‘disillusionment’, however, which ‘still harbors some degree of pride and a respect for the intellect’ has no such indeterminacy, according to Quinney. Unlike disappointment, ‘proceeding rather than progressing’, disillusionment is tied up with a certain acceptance of disappointment, and ‘carries a sense of potential advantage in its newfound acquaintance with the truth’.25 Reading this in relation to Ashbery, we can say that ‘A Wave’ is embracing of the impermanence of disappointment, whereas subsequent volumes are defined by a ‘repaired’ sense of poetry in which permanence reigns. This is a move to an extent prescribed by earlier stylistic successes, primarily in ‘A Wave’, and by Ashbery’s now crystallised perception of its achievement as the aim of poetry. That is, ‘A Wave’ is both continued and discontinued in April Galleons. In ‘A Wave’ there is no consolation, but also no consolidation; April Galleons, on the other hand, presents the continuation of this style, a becalming of it and a settling down whereby it is no longer subject to the incessant questioning of political anxiety. This settling occasions a number of changes in stylistic function. ‘Start[ing] in the middle’, for example, the condition for staging a realtime self-interrogation in ‘A Wave’, is simply an arbitrary choice of register rather than an expression of political crisis: Let’s start in the middle, as usual. Ever since I burnt my mouth I talk two ways, first as reluctant explainer, then as someone offstage In a dream, hushing those who might wake you from this dream, Imperfectly got up as a lutanist. (AG, 27)

There is very much a sense of the ‘as usual’ about Ashbery’s later work; this style goes largely unchanged for the next twenty years. Ashbery’s

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poetry of time in April Galleons, Flow Chart and Hotel Lautréamont takes comfort in itself; helping us to understand and cope with indeterminacy and temporal uncertainty in life, by simply mirroring it, comes to be seen as the consolation of poetry. Difficulty, once associated with an avant-garde poetics of antagonism, is now reassuring; floating through the indeterminate layers of these later poems can help us accept the indeterminacy of experience. In a development of the pained complexity of ‘A Wave’, Ashbery responds to inconsistency and conflict by more conservatively inviting us to accept, even revel in it – to ‘sample the disjointedness / Of a far-from-level deck’. ‘For ages,’ another poem in April Galleons resignedly asserts, ‘man has labored to put his dreams in order. Look at the result’ (AG, 58). ‘A Wave’ is perhaps such a failed, tortured attempt at order; Ashbery’s later poetry, on the other hand, in accepting its failures, does not so much labour as, in the analogy invited by Ashbery’s 1991 book-length poem, Flow Chart, go with the flow. Though the politics of this approach become increasingly antithetical to contemporary movements in the American avant-garde, there are still rewards for readers of Ashbery’s admittedly prolific output from the last twenty-five years. And the Stars Were Shining, though often overshadowed by Flow Chart, is Ashbery’s most important late volume, and the beauty of its long title poem almost justifies any crystallisation of form. The strange religious elements of Ashbery’s 1994 collection are perhaps the surest sign that his work has moved away from its earlier avantgardism. ‘And the Stars Were Shining’ is a key poem in Ashbery’s career because it is the most open about, and demonstratively conscious of, its consolatory function. There is no room here to attempt a full account of the work, but its beginning is exemplary: It was the solstice, and it was jumping on you like a friendly dog. The stars were still out in the field, and the child prostitutes plied their trade, the only happy ones, having learned how unhappiness sticks and will not risk being traded in for a song or a balloon. Christmas decorations were getting crumpled in offices by staffers slumped at their video terminals, and dismay articulated otherness in orphan asylums where the coffee percolates eternally, and God is not light but God, as mysterious to Himself as we are to Him. Say that on some other day garlands disbanded in the fresh feel of some sea air, that curious gulls coasted from great distances to make sure nothing was getting more than its share of pebbles, and the leaky faucet suddenly stopped dripping: It was day, after all. One of those things like a length of sleep

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like a woman’s stocking, that you lay flat and it becomes a unit of your life and – this is where it gets complicated – of so many others’ lives as well that there is no point in trying to make out, even less read, the superimposed scripts in which the changes of the decades were rung, endlessly, like invading kelp, and whatever it takes to be a simp is likely not what saved you in time to get here, changing buses twice, and after, when they sent you to your corner to lick your wounds you found you liked licking so much you added it to your repertory of insane gestures, confident that sleep would punish those outside even as it rescued you from the puzzle of the dance, some old fire, thought extinguished, that now blazes in the stove, and in an instant we realize we are free to go and return indefinitely. (SS, 76)

Ashbery’s earlier work is rarely as tragically moving as ‘And the Stars Were Shining’, or the other archetypal poem of this kind, the justly admired ‘A Driftwood Altar’ (HL, 81–2). Here, having ‘learned how unhappiness sticks’, Ashbery has set aside the interpretation and reading so central to his poetics in Three Poems, ‘Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror’ and ‘A Wave’, to focus on the solace of representing the experience of failure, however unclear: ‘it becomes a unit of your life and – this is where it / gets complicated – of so many others’ lives as well / that there is no point in trying to make out, even less read, / the superimposed script.’ The transition from ‘early’ to ‘late’ Ashbery is one of the most visible and important developments in Ashbery’s career, but also one of the least talked about. As serious reflections on the overall trajectory of Ashbery’s œuvre are being invited by the publication of a Selected Later Poems and a two-volume Collected Poems, the task of clarifying the significance of the influential early work and the more ignored later work, and of the dynamic between the two, should be a priority for Ashbery criticism. The move away from The Tennis Court Oath, from ‘leaving it all out’ to ‘putting it all in’, the changes occurring after Ashbery’s entrance into the literary mainstream with Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror – these are important developments, no doubt, but Ashbery’s engagement with Wordsworth in ‘A Wave’ and after affects a much longer period. The contention here is that Ashbery, in his own idiosyncratic way for sure, becomes a Wordsworthian poet in these years. In its concerns with failure and consolation, Ashbery’s later work has settled on a privileged form for itself, just as Wordsworth’s had settled on the final priority of Nature. Though one cannot expect Ashbery to be constantly reinventing

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language, it is important to note that, in this, something is undoubtedly lost. Paul Breslin has spoken of the loss of the sense of occasion in Ashbery’s work, ‘since all occasions are really only one occasion of consciousness meditating on its own frustrations’.26 This describes the nature of Ashbery’s continuation of ‘A Wave’ and its poetics: the situation, that is, is generalised – that is to say, disappears – in later Ashbery, and, as a consequence, so does Ashbery’s distinctive style of reading and intertextuality. As in The Prelude, where all social voices are submerged to the poet’s, alone in Nature following the poem’s failure and consolation, so Ashbery’s later poetry, in a move initiated by ‘A Wave’, rather than reading it, appropriates most ‘superimposed script’ to one voice, to what is now stereotyped as the ‘Ashberyan mode’. The results are sometimes moving, often more ‘personal’, and perhaps more appropriate to the poetry of old age. But they are, ultimately, unlikely to be the results in which Ashbery’s singular influence on American poetry will be most felt.

Notes 1. For a discussion of Ashbery’s politics and their relation to the poetry of the 1960s, see David Herd, John Ashbery and American Poetry, pp. 93–143. 2. Ashbery first conceives of the poem in the summer of 1980, and begins an early version of it, under the title, ‘Landscape with Tobias and the Angel’, shortly after. The poem that emerges from this fragment, what would become ‘A Wave’, is begun towards the end of 1982. This is also shortly after Ashbery nearly dies of a spinal infection. See John Shoptaw, On the Outside Looking Out, p. 275. I do not attempt a full historical reading of ‘A Wave’ itself, but rather to understand the poem’s motivations in the political context in which it so evidently operates. 3. Perhaps the most notable cosmetic feature of Reagan’s presidency was his use of television, where he announced everything from tax policy changes to updates on war situations. See especially Robert L. Scott, ‘Cold War and Rhetoric’, and Robert L. Ivie, ‘Metaphor and the Rhetorical Invention of Cold War “Idealists” ’. See also Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes, pp. 225–56. 4. Stephen Paul Miller, Seventies Now: Culture as Surveillance, p. 137. 5. Harold Bloom, Figures of Capable Imagination, p. 172. 6. Bonnie Costello, ‘John Ashbery’s Landscapes’, p. 174; Robert von Hallberg, American Poetry and Culture, 1945–1980, p. 37. The former, which reads Ashbery’s landscapes as a kind of radical Romanticism that has detached meditation from reality, follows Helen Vendler’s reading of Ashbery’s poems. Bonnie Costello states: ‘Consciousness of landscape has become, for [Ashbery], indistinguishable from consciousness as landscape’ (‘John Ashbery’s Landscapes’, p. 174). While these conceptions hit on a partial truth, recourse to the classic Ashbery category of ‘consciousness’ is both limiting and vague in application to the political and stylistic crisis of ‘A

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7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

John Ashbery and English Poetry Wave’. Angus Fletcher gives the most persuasive account of Ashbery’s ‘consciousness landscapes’ (see A New Theory for American Poetry). Structural accounts of Ashbery are typified in the commentary of Robert von Hallberg (American Poetry and Culture, 1945–1980) and, more recently, by Edward Larrissy (‘ “Is Anything Central?”: Ashbery and the Idea of a Centre’) and Willard Speigelman (How Poets See the World: The Art of Description in Contemporary Poetry), and take as their subject Ashbery’s symbolism of centres. Placing Ashbery in the context of systems analysis, indeed as a ‘systems analysis writer’, von Hallberg suggests that ‘what appears disordered’ in Ashbery ‘is in fact complexly ordered’, showing that ‘the conflicts inherent in economic, political, and social activity can be reduced by the proper coordination of competing factors’ (p. 61). The advantage of this approach is that it addresses the problems of context and subject in Ashbery’s work while relating it to the outside world; the notion of centres and margins seems slightly dated, however, assuming as it does essentially static and symbolic landscapes in Ashbery. William Wordsworth, Prose Works I, p. 150. Cited in Mary Rahme, ‘Coleridge’s Concept of Symbolism’, p. 621. See also Geoffrey Hartman, ‘Wordsworth, Inscriptions, and Romantic Nature Poetry’. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Dialogues. Quoted in Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 118. Jun’ichiro Takachi, ‘Something Different and New – Questions to John Ashbery’, p. 12. Janet Bloom and Robert Losada, ‘Craft Interview with John Ashbery’, p. 116. Christopher Middleton, ‘A Wave (1984)’, pp. 41–2. For accounts of the author in Symbolism, see especially René Wellek, ‘The Term and Concept of Symbolism in Literary History’. Wellek, echoing Verlaine, says that in Symbolism, ‘The inner world, la durée, in the Bergsonian sense, is represented or often merely hinted at as “it,” the thing or the person hidden. One could say that the grammatical predicate has become the subject’ (p. 264). Joan Dayan, ‘Finding What Will Suffice: John Ashbery’s A Wave’, p. 1045. The best account of ‘A Wave’, to which I am indebted here, remains S. P. Mohanty and Jonathan Monroe’s essay, ‘John Ashbery and the Articulation of the Social’. George Armstrong Kelly, Victims, Authority and Terror, p. 4. See also Richard Cobb, The Police and the People, pp. 49–52, 77–8, 87–8, 246–9; and François Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, pp. 38–9, 48, 50. Alan Liu, Wordsworth: The Sense of History, p. 384. Liu’s italics. For discussions of this see James K. Chandler, Wordsworth’s Second Nature, and Paul de Man, Rhetoric of Romanticism, pp. 50–9. Raymond Williams’s words are also suggestive: ‘Wordsworth saw strangeness, a loss of connection, not at first in social but in perceptual ways: a failure of identity in the crowd of others which worked back to a loss of identity in the self, and then, in these ways, a loss of society itself, its overcoming and replacement by a procession of images’ (Raymond Williams, The Country and the City, p. 150).

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19. Norman Finkelstein, The Utopian Moment in Contemporary American Poetry, p. 49. 20. Keith Cohen, ‘Ashbery’s Dismantling of Bourgeois Discourse’, pp. 138–9. 21. John Emil Vincent has, in his recent John Ashbery and You, has provided the first book-length study of Ashbery’s later work (dating from April Galleons). There are two fundamental problems with Vincent’s approach, however. Firstly, though thematising the period around the ‘you’ of the poetry, which is quite as important in Ashbery’s early work, Vincent does nothing to signify a shift from early to late Ashbery, and therefore makes no case for thinking about a ‘late’ Ashbery at all. Though uncritically celebrating individual collections, Vincent gives no sense of the overall shape of Ashbery’s later work, nor does he account for why it has been far less influential than the earlier poetry. Secondly, Vincent fails to think through the political questions that are surely central to thinking about two periods in Ashbery’s work – indeed, there is little historical contextualisation of his ‘you’ at all. 22. Shoptaw, On the Outside Looking Out, p. 295. 23. Laura Quinney, The Poetics of Disappointment: Wordsworth to Ashbery, p. 137. 24. Ibid., p. 142. 25. Ibid., p. 2. 26. Paul Breslin, The Psycho-Political Muse: American Poetry Since the Fifties, p. 216.

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Chapter Four

‘These decibels’: Eliot, Ashbery and allusion

In 1960, The New American Poetry, Donald Allen’s seminal anthology of the burgeoning US avant-garde, proclaimed the death of the Pound / Eliot axis in American poetry and, in a crucial turn for the poets associated with this American renaissance, the blossoming of an alternative Pound / Williams tradition.1 Following ‘the practice and precepts of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams’, as Allen noted in his preface, the poets in his volume showed, in both their poems and their ‘Statements on Poetics’, how this new poetry was to be conceived as a rejection of Eliot.2 The best-represented figures in The New American Poetry (Charles Olson, Denise Levertov, Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg and Frank O’Hara) left readers in little doubt that the new trajectory of American poetry was moving away from the formal, high-symbolist erudition of the Eliotic Middle Generation to the anti-symbolist, liberated and direct verse of Williams. Where, though, did Ashbery, who occupied eight pages of Allen’s book, fit in? His poems in the volume – ‘A Boy’, ‘The Instruction Manual’ and ‘ “How Much Longer Will I Be Able to Inhabit the Divine Sepulchre” ’ – showed a poetry clearly rejecting the Eliot manifested in the Middle Generation. Ashbery was also, however, in his wilful reticence, evidently at odds with the rest of the volume’s ‘sons of Pound and Williams’ announced by Olson in the book’s centrepiece, ‘Projective Verse’.3 Ashbery’s commentators have, in accordance with The New American Poetry’s narrative, been keen to keep Ashbery and Eliot apart. Marjorie Perloff, for example, has insisted that Ashbery’s ‘refusal to “mean” in conventional ways’ fundamentally opposes him to The Waste Land’s ‘perfectly coherent symbolic structure’, and Eliot’s ‘Symbolist heirs like Lowell and Berryman’.4 As a poet of ‘indeterminacy’, Ashbery is the very antithesis of the Eliotic mode for Perloff, and represents a breakthrough, helping us to speak of postmodernism as a rejection of modernism. Some, such as James Longenbach, have challenged this narrative,

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but there has, on the whole, been an acceptance of the opposed nature of the two poets.5 The main tendency has been to set Ashbery against Eliot on the ground of allusive method. Vernon Shetley, for example, suggests that, unlike Eliotic allusion, which creates a ‘sense of a whole’, Ashbery’s references ‘project a world that is fundamentally unknowable’.6 Perloff, in a later essay, likewise speaks of how ‘an Eliotic distinction between citation and invention . . . is felt to be no longer possible’ when we read Ashbery.7 There are crucial distinctions to be made in the two poets’ allusive methods, but it is worth exploring whether such distinctions are to be based on Ashbery’s (mis)reading of Eliot or an out-ofhand rejection of him, and if, given that Ashbery’s allusive methods lie at the heart of his poetry’s relation to the past, we can specify the difference between the two poets as something more interesting and fundamental than the point made by the critics here: that Ashbery’s allusions are more ambiguous than Eliot’s. Ashbery is reluctant simply to reject Eliot, as other New American Poets did in the late 1950s, because of the obviously key figure he represents for the poet of reading that Ashbery wishes to become. Inevitably, it is against the background of Eliot’s monumental engagement with the poetry of the past that Ashbery is forced to define his own sense of reading. Eliot, ubiquitous in the cultural climate of Ashbery’s early career, and still the dominant voice on questions of tradition and intertextuality, needs to be worked out by Ashbery. Ashbery begins writing, then, as he himself describes it, within ‘the rules for modern American poetry that had been gradually drawn up from Pound and Eliot down to the academic establishment of the 1940s’ (SPr, 129). The question is, how did Ashbery conceive of these ‘rules’ in his early career? In 1963, he wrote: Eliot’s and subsequent fragmentations in poetry have shown us how to deal with fragments: by leaving them as they are, at most intuiting a meaning from their proximity to each other, but in general leaving it at that. (RS, 42)

It is fair to say that not many of Ashbery’s contemporaries were reading Eliot as a poet content with ‘leaving it at that’. Ashbery is grafting on to Eliot, in a way his contemporaries were unconcerned with doing, some of the aesthetic characteristics of the New York avant-garde, with its movement ‘from making to accepting’, to use the words of John Cage, and its general tendency ‘against interpretation’, as Susan Sontag would put it one year after these comments on Eliot.8 However, in contradiction to his other assertions, Ashbery also notes in 1962 that ‘Eliot couldn’t evoke a gasworks without feeling obliged

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to call the whole history of human thought into play’ (RS, 82). Eliot’s conscious project to understand and manipulate ‘the whole history of human thought’, or what is called ‘tradition’ in Eliot’s criticism, stands uneasily in the background of Ashbery’s fragmentary Eliot. Ashbery later says: Faced with an altered reality, Eliot reacts as though in a stupor. Despite all his craft and scholarship, The Waste Land achieves its effect as a collage of hallucinatory, random fragments, ‘shored against my ruin.’ [sic] Their contiguity is all their meaning, and it is implied that from now on meaning will take into account the randomness and discontinuity of modern experience, that indeed meaning cannot be truthfully defined as anything else. (RS, 301–2)

The anxiety here is clear: Ashbery’s engagement with Eliot is an attempt to read him ‘despite all his craft and scholarship’. The question of how one does this, how one writes under the influence of Eliot the poet as distinct from Eliot the scholar, is a dilemma that Ashbery is troubled by, in all its contradictions. My aim here is to look at the two principal manifestations of Eliot in Ashbery’s work, ‘Europe’ and ‘The Skaters’ – one an unsuccessful attempt at emulation, the other a major poem and important answer to what Eliot had asked the avant-garde – to discover the place of Eliot in Ashbery’s ‘history of the present’. Ashbery’s emphasis, then, is mainly on the ‘fragmentations’ of Eliot’s poetry. We know the partial truth of such a reading from The Waste Land. Here is this poem’s ending: I sat upon the shore Fishing, with the arid plain behind me Shall I at least set my lands in order? London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina Quando fiam uti chelidon – O swallow swallow Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie These fragments I have shored against my ruins Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe. Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata. Shantih shantih shantih9

It takes some courage to claim that this is ‘perfectly coherent’, as Perloff does. The concentrated arrangement of both complementary and contesting fragments enacts the well-rehearsed problems of meaning in the poem. The various references are well documented, but a mere outline of them is illustrative. Firstly, there is the question of the Grail quest, which is here incomplete and anti-climactic as the Fisher King – with whom the ‘I’ of the poem is identified at this point – sits before the still ‘arid’ land.

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This is followed by a decidedly climactic moment of destruction, which also brings with it the weight of the nursery rhyme, its various motifs of ‘washing away’ and a ‘fair lady’ who is ‘locked up’ referring to the practice of burying a dead virgin under the bridge to ensure its strength. The lines from Dante are a reference to another poet in turn – namely, Daniel Artaud – who ‘hid himself in the fire that purifies’ on Mount Purgatory, which unexpectedly returns us to ‘The Fire Sermon’ of section three (which is, both in the section and in the Buddhist sermon from which it takes its name, far from a purifying force). We are then returned to the myth of Philomel in the form of the Pervigilium Veneris, and simultaneously directed to Whitman’s elegy for Lincoln, ‘When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d’ (‘O how shall I warble myself for the dead one there I loved?’) and Tennyson’s ‘The Princess’ – as well as to the myth of Osiris, The Golden Bough’s chapters to which Eliot pays homage in his ‘Notes’ to the poem. The allusion to Nerval and the Prince of Aquitaine in the abandoned tower relates back to both the London Bridge nursery rhyme and the Grail legend. The final allusions to Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy are perhaps the strangest of all: ‘Why then Ile fit you’ specifically points to the moment at which Hieronymo, agreeing to write a play for the court, decides to avenge his son’s recent murder – a situation whose relevance is unclear. In the subtitle of the play that Eliot then uses, ‘Hieronymo’s mad againe’, there is a problem of fragmentation in the source text itself, since we do not know, having lost an earlier play of Kyd’s, the conditions under which Hieronymo went mad the first time. Interfering further with this already less-than-clear constellation of texts is the ambiguity of Eliot’s notes. The final Sanskrit fragments are noted, unhelpfully, for their untranslatability: on ‘Shantih’, Eliot tells us in the original notes, ‘ “The Peace which passeth understanding” is a feeble translation of the content of this word.’ It is correct to say that there is still a symbolism here; but, as Eliot commentator Grover Smith points out, there is a ‘danger’ in Eliot, ‘lest multiplied allusions, adventitious or not, should defeat meaning’.10 There is, to put it simply, too much symbolism for coherence. And yet, in reading incoherence into Eliot’s work, Ashbery none the less views Eliot as an essentially non- or even anti-symbolic poet. We see this in his first long poem, ‘Europe’, from 1962’s The Tennis Court Oath. O’Hara referred to the poem as ‘the most striking thing since The Wasteland [sic]’.11 The comparison is no coincidence: ‘Europe’ models itself on The Waste Land, and specifically on The Waste Land of ‘hallucinatory, random fragments’. In this sense, ‘Europe’ resolves the conflict of a fragmentary yet programmatic Eliot by simply ignoring the programmatic aspects of Eliot’s work.

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Most obviously, ‘Europe’ follows Eliot in the adoption of a central, structuring source text. As Eliot built The Waste Land around Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance, Ashbery takes William LeQueux’s 1917 World War One children’s detective story, Beryl of the Biplane. This is, on the face of it, a clear departure from Eliot. While The Waste Land takes academic anthropology for the basic fabric of its symbolism, Ashbery has, according to his own recollection, ‘cannibalised a book for teenage girls . . . found in a bookstall’.12 This supports Perloff’s contention that the ‘identification [of citations] doesn’t necessarily help us to understand the poem’ in Ashbery’s work.13 Ashbery himself conceives of such allusive difficulty as a continuation rather than a revision of Eliot, however. He was later to say of The Tennis Court Oath: one of the things I liked about modern poetry when I first began to read it was that it was hard to understand, so I thought, ‘Well, I’m just writing in the modern tradition’. But then I discovered that my poetry was a little too hard, and that I had overstepped the bounds of the tradition.14

This rhetoric of the accident, of course, already contains the kernel of Ashbery’s disagreement with Eliot, however much it is conceived as a continuation. Just as his insistence is on the fragmentation of Eliot’s allusions, his choice of text is, unlike the symbolic economy of From Ritual to Romance, which unifies The Waste Land, a forgotten fragment from history, randomly flung into Ashbery’s poem to represent the disintegration of Europe. Eliot’s breakthrough was to make allusion the driving force of a poem – no longer clarifying or illustrative, as it had been in Milton or Wordsworth, allusion in Eliot’s work is constitutive of a poem’s complex and fragmented symbolic structure. In ‘Europe’, Ashbery takes this further by simply lifting whole sections of LeQueux’s novel and placing them in his poem. Ashbery says that the poem was ‘an attempt to shuffle the cards before dealing them again’, suggesting that ‘Europe’ is a mere random rearrangement.15 Juxtaposing the two texts, this seems true: ‘The Hornet’ had been tampered with, one of the steel bolts having been replaced with one of wood! ‘This is the work of the enemy!’ remarked Ronnie thoughtfully. ‘They cannot obtain sight of the silencer, therefore there has been a dastardly plot to kill both of us. We must be a little more wary in future, dear.’16 blue smoke? It was as though She had

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one of wood! Ronnie, thoughtfully of the silencer plot to kill both of us, dear. (TCO, 83)

The poem looks like wreckage of the novel’s prose. In accordance with his reading of The Waste Land, rather than reproducing LeQueux’s sentences for what they mean or symbolise, Ashbery dismembers his source text in an attempt to reproduce the effect of reading sentences, amid a world that makes the attention required for reading impossible. Ashbery’s claim that Eliot expresses ‘the randomness and discontinuity of modern experience, that indeed meaning cannot be truthfully defined as anything else’ (RS, 301–2), is reflected in an account of ‘modern’ reading as discontinuity rather than meaning. It is the essence of Ashbery’s reading of Eliot in ‘Europe’ that meaning is what escapes symbolism, or even signification. Ashbery takes a paradoxical ‘construction ball’ (TCO, 64) to Beryl, constructing an account of reading that, in its necessary fragmentation, destroys the novel. ‘Europe’, in accordance with this destruction, adopts an Eliotic vocabulary of ruin. There is, of course, more to ‘Europe’ than Beryl of the Biplane, though most other parts of the poem are linked thematically to the fragments of the First World War that LeQueux’s novel introduces to the poem. A passage from section 34 is typical of the poem’s tone: dying for they do not the hole no crow can and finally the day of thirst in the air. whistles carbon dioxide. Cold pavement grew. The powerful machine The tractor around edge the listless children. Good night staining the naughty air with marvellous rings. You are going there. Weeps. The wreath not decorating. The kids pile over the ample funeral hill. had arrived from London o’clock baited tragically This time the others grew The others waited by the darkening pool – ‘a world of silence’ you can’t understand their terror means more to these people waste (69–70)

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The allusions to Eliot – ‘dying / with a little patience’, the rock-landscape of ‘What the Thunder Said’, Ophelia’s ‘Good night sweet ladies’ of ‘A Game of Chess’, ‘waste’ – suggest an inherited terminology, and indeed a shared imagining of Europe. It should not surprise us to find Eliotic atmospherics in the poem, for the poem thematises the same declining civilisation as The Waste Land. The fragmentation of ‘Europe’ is defined partly by the uncertainty of ‘the map of Europe / shrink[ing]’ (74). Living in Paris when he wrote the poem in 1958, when the urban redevelopment that was still ongoing in the city was being heavily funded by the US, Ashbery would have sensed such geopolitical shifts directly. Though we can assume he has a different political take on the death throes of European imperialism to Eliot, Ashbery is in the main concerned with the epistemological implications of such ‘waste’. ‘I don’t understand wreckage’ (83), the poem says, and so the way to ‘take into account the randomness and discontinuity of modern experience’ authentically is to imitate this lack of understanding – by leaving fragments ‘as they are’, beyond understanding. And so we return to the rhetoric of accident and passivity so central to the poem: ‘The editor realized / its gradual abandonment / a kind of block where other men come down’ (65), Ashbery writes. The poem operates ‘By an unseen hand’ (74), as in section 60: Wing Bostonian and his comments thirty-three years old the day of his third birthday the legs Lenin de Gaulle three days later also comparing simple (75)

‘Comparing simply’, or simply comparing, is difficult for the poem, which is reduced to flinging its biplane parts, Henry James novels and twentieth-century political leaders together in the ruins of a meaningful Europe. ‘[P]owerless creating images’ (81) and on a ‘wave of nausea’ (64), that is, Ashbery sets himself up as the Eliotic poet he understands to be ‘react[ing] in a stupor’ in The Waste Land. Ashbery said of ‘Europe’ at the time: ‘I have been attempting to keep meaningfulness up to the pace of the randomness. I don’t feel I’ve succeeded in doing this in poems like “Europe”.’17 Ashbery’s subsequent comments on the poem and volume repeatedly concede that their accidentalism was exaggerated. Though Ashbery would remain the ‘compulsory collagiste’ he terms himself in a letter of 1975, the nature of

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The Tennis Court Oath’s compulsion is ultimately a dead-end for him.18 The composition of ‘Europe’, and many other poems in the collection, is presented as natural abandonment, as if the poet or individual is simply helpless amidst the fragmentation of the modern world. In one sense at least, Ashbery’s poem is ‘too hard’ because it is too extreme an account of how the mind absorbs even the most manifold heteroglossia. Ashbery notes some years later: the poem ‘Europe’ . . . is one that’s no longer very close to me. At the time I was baffled as to what to do in poetry; I wasn’t satisfied with the way my work was going and I felt it was time to just clear my head by writing whatever came into it and that’s very much the case in that poem.19

The grafting of a species of automatic writing on to Eliotic strategies of intertextuality, we can say, alienated Ashbery from his own poetry. This is not to dismiss The Tennis Court Oath or Ashbery’s early response to Eliot, but it is, admittedly, to relegate it to a position of retrospective interest, whereby its importance lies as a symptom of Ashbery’s disagreements with Eliot, rather than the aesthetic expression of an alternative. The dilemmas ‘Europe’ uncovers for Ashbery, however, do pave the way for the transformation of Eliotic strategies that the mature Ashbery will carry out by investigating the poem’s assumptions, and questioning ‘the modern tradition’ in which the poem uncritically placed its faith. * * * As we have seen, there are contradictions in Ashbery’s reading of Eliot, which ‘Europe’ attempts to evade. On the one hand, Ashbery presents an Eliot fragmented ‘despite all his craft and scholarship’; on the other, he is aware of how, by dint of this scholarly craft, ‘Eliot couldn’t evoke a gasworks without feeling obliged to call the whole history of human thought into play’. Ultimately, Ashbery cannot help but see the centrality of ‘arcane scholarly reference’ to Eliot’s work (SPr, 85), and it is the absence of this architecture of reference, we may infer, that Ashbery sees as a contributing factor in the failure of ‘Europe’. The question posed by ‘Europe’ is whether the ‘fragmented brilliance’ of Eliot is possible without obligations regarding ‘the whole history of human thought’ that somehow sit uncomfortably alongside it, or whether, in effect, Ashbery wants an Eliot he cannot properly have. The exaggerated fragmentations of ‘Europe’ are partly explained by Ashbery’s early need, as a self-proclaimed avant-gardiste, to reclaim Eliot as the poet of The Waste Land rather than the scholar who had become the father of the New Criticism, the Middle Generation of poets in America and a similar group of poets in England. English and

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American poets of the 1950s found Eliot predominantly in his criticism, making him a much less radical figure for it. Donald Davie spoke for ‘The Movement’ in his frankness about Eliot: the effigy was not of Eliot the poet, but of Eliot the author of those influential essays, ‘The Metaphysical Poets’, ‘Andrew Marvell’ and ‘Homage to John Dryden’ . . . [My work] had nothing to do with Eliot’s practice as a poet, but had everything to do with what he was taken to have recommended in theory.20

The penchant for the Metaphysicals among similar poets in the US, like Robert Lowell and W. D. Snodgrass, suggests a similar engagement with Eliot. Lowell goes through Eliot to the seventeenth-century rhythms of Lord Weary’s Castle, Ashbery to the disjunction of The Tennis Court Oath. Ashbery’s reading of Eliot, compared to Davie or Lowell, demonstrates no adherence to Eliot’s literary or cultural criticism whatsoever. There is no sense of ‘leaving [things] as they are’ in ‘Homage to John Dryden’, and it may only be possible to emphasise the fragmentation of The Waste Land, as Ashbery does, by ignoring Eliot’s critical work. Eliot’s fragments seem much more painstakingly arranged when we read them in relation to his theoretical work. Eliot’s term for this organisation is the ‘historical sense’, a decisive concept in Eliot’s poetics, which in practice means the somewhat daunting ‘feeling [for] the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer’.21 The Waste Land can be conceived, within this concept, as an act of literary history: ‘the great poet’, Eliot writes, is one ‘who in his poetry re-twines as many straying strands of tradition as possible’.22 Michael Levenson has described the central organising factor in Eliot’s historical sense as his theory of ‘points of view’, whereby the poet seeks to transcend both the individual subjectivism and the short perspective of his contemporary moment by ‘widening’ its context with an ‘increasingly elaborate set of cultural parallels’.23 Rather than simply ‘intuiting’ fragmentation, as ‘Europe’ seems to suggest, The Waste Land’s multiplicity is, as another critic has put it, part of an attempt to take ‘bearings at all points of the compass’ to give ‘an objective and impersonal assessment of where we are’.24 The important thing for Eliot is perspective: as ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ has it, ‘No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone . . . you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.’25 Eliot distinguishes the historical sense, therefore, from reading as ‘saturation’, ‘a kind of inundation, of invasion in the undeveloped personality’ of the reader.26 Describing the process of reading, he says: [First we] understand the rules of his own game, adopt his own point of view . . . [Second] we measure him by outside standard, most pertinently by the

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standards of language and of something called Poetry, in our own language and in the language of European literature.27

The second stage, the filtering of the work through tradition, overcomes the limitations of the first; it is the essential positioning of poetry in a programme, the conscious working out of where a poem stands in a schematised system. Eliot writes: ‘a tradition without intelligence is not worth having . . . the maintenance of orthodoxy is a matter which calls for the exercise of our conscious intelligence.’28 The implications of Eliot’s position for Ashbery’s own concerns with past–present relations are addressed in a statement for a National Book Awards symposium in 1968. Here, in an argument that dovetails with ‘The Invisible Avant-Garde’, a lecture worked on at the same time and concerned with the ‘fine distinction between “a” tradition and “the” tradition’ (RS, 389), Ashbery argues that New York School’s ‘program’ is ‘the absence of any program’, and ‘amounts to not planning the poem in advance but letting it take its own way: of living in a state of alert and being ready to change your mind if the occasion seems to require it’ (SPr, 115). This sounds obscurant, but there is something crucial at stake in the distinction Ashbery is trying to make. Though the New York School certainly does have a reading program, however unprogrammatic it may be, Ashbery’s problem with Eliot is that his operates in a way that somehow predetermines meaning, both in the world and in the text. Ashbery’s anxiety is that evocations of the ‘whole’ of history, rather than expressing the multiplicity that he is so eager to read into Eliot’s work, can easily signify a monolithic unification of the past and one’s experience of it. Ashbery’s lecture is, as a New York School manifesto of sorts, obviously part of a wider aesthetic emerging around Ashbery. O’Hara makes a fundamental distinction between programmatic reading, which views the work of the past as constituent of the continuous universal currents of poetry, and a different kind of reading able to suggest the newness and difference of the present. He says in a 1965 interview: the absorption of Lowell in the imitations of Pasternak, of Rilke and so on is domesticating in a certain way [while] the attraction that, say, Ginsberg feels for Pasternak and Mayakovsky . . . is quite a signal of a different kind of talent but also a different kind of mind, a different kind of ability to empathise outside.29

Lowell, that is, absorbs his poets, as the word ‘imitation’ suggests, domesticating them by enacting the sameness of his and their art; Ginsberg, on the other hand, is able to encompass the difference or

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‘outsideness’ of Mayakovsky to himself. In the same interview O’Hara speaks of the problems a ‘capitalist country’ like the US has in applying its ‘acquisitive impulse’ to art. To acquire is to own and make one’s own, a tendency opposed to what it is that makes art, and particularly avant-garde art, powerful: ‘Art is not your life, it is someone else’s. Something very difficult for the acquisitive spirit to understand.’30 O’Hara specifically demands that art not be subsumed to pre-existing conceptions, personal or historical, and seeks rather to make reading present, while resisting the temptation to do so by simply translating it into the present’s language and concerns. The argument against ‘acquisition’ is finessed in a later discussion of Jackson Pollock, Ashbery’s own representative of the enemy of ‘tradition’ in ‘The Invisible Avant-Garde’. Pollock, O’Hara argues, did not ‘assimilate’ or ‘appropriate’ what was beautiful, frenzied, ugly or candid in others, but enriched it and flung it back to their work, as if it were a reinterpretation for the benefit of all, a clarification and apotheosis which does not destroy the things seen, whether of nature or art, but preserves it in a pure regard. Very few things, it seems, were assimilated or absorbed by Pollock. They were left intact, and given back.31

Pollock is able to place the present literally within his engagement with past cultural forms, in the shape of glass, wire, insects and other concrete ephemera; these are ‘given back’ with the cultural artefact. Ashbery, of course, attempts none of the concretion of Pollock or O’Hara. We do see, though, what such a ‘flinging back’ might mean for the practical act of reading in Ashbery’s criticism. In his Charles Eliot Norton Lectures of 1989 to 1990, later published as Other Traditions, for example, Ashbery’s resistance to Eliot’s ‘orthodoxy’ and ‘outside standard’ is pointed. Ashbery can be found offering this gloss on a David Schubert poem: ‘none of this quite adds up, and, in the way of a Schubert poem, it shouldn’t: what we are left with is a bouquet of many layered, splintered meanings, to be clasped but never fully understood’ (OT, 134). The resistance is to analysis over experience, and Ashbery is apparently satisfied, to use Eliot’s terms, by his original ‘inundation’. Therefore, following a cursory interpretation of a Laura Riding poem, Ashbery concludes, ‘that may be her meaning; to me, it doesn’t matter because the overwhelmingly spare and beautiful language has already satisfied me’ (113). Eliot’s own Norton lectures, delivered sixty-seven years earlier, had titles like ‘The Age of Dryden’ and ‘The Modern Mind’, with the aim of ‘manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity’.32 The past, that is, was not ‘given back’ by Eliot, but absorbed into a predetermined programme of meanings

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that, it turns out, explains the poverty of the present. Such meanings, static in conception, are the opposite of the immediate forces that interest Ashbery – ‘the extraordinary power’, as Ashbery says of John Wheelwright, of ‘language as it flashes by on its way from somewhere to somewhere else’ (72). Ashbery’s readerly concern, as he had put it more generally in 1968, is with ‘living in a state of alert’ to notice such things. Other Traditions is purely reactive to certain modes of critical engagement with poetry; Ashbery is not a critic, and this is very much the point made in the lectures. The point is made with far higher stakes in his poetry, though, and can help us clarify what is at issue in ‘The Skaters’. The crucial objection to Eliot’s reading is how, within it, poetry becomes an extension of the past as myth. Eliot, that is, in contrast to Ashbery and O’Hara, denies the present by suggesting it has already happened in myth. For myths have nothing to do with their having occurred in the past; and Eliot’s ‘mythical method’ is an attempt to construct a primordial, ahistorical story of all history, including the present. (Charles Olson had attempted to repudiate this ahistoricism directly, by conceiving of myth as something that had happened, to the extent that he thought of mythical figures as real-life historical persons.) For Eliot, myth is the final ‘historical sense’ because it solves the ‘saturation’ of history by a programme so subsuming that it can finally do away with history itself. Eliot writes: The maxim, Return to the Sources, is a good one. More intelligibly put, it is that the poet should know everything that has been accomplished in poetry (accomplished not merely produced) since its beginnings – in order to know what he is doing himself. He should be aware of all the metamorphoses of poetry that illustrate the stratifications of history that cover savagery.33

Eliot, that is, uses history in order to remove it – to ‘[un]cover savagery’. As the title of Other Traditions suggests, Ashbery’s critical point – a point he had made 20 years earlier in ‘The Invisible Avant-Garde’ (RS, 310) – is that it is possible, and desirable, to read the art of the past outside of a single organising programme. For Ashbery and O’Hara at least, unlike Pollock flinging history back, Eliot pre-conceives of the present as a deterioration of the past. Figures like Dido and Cleopatra, Tiresias, Augustine and Dante are ‘points of view’; operating as disembodied personae or perspectives assumed by Eliot, they are ironically distanced from the poet and the ‘modern life’ that surrounds him. F. R. Leavis, inspired by Eliot’s work, wrote of how modern art must alienate itself from the present: ‘if literary culture is to be saved it must be by conscious effort; by education carefully designed to meet the exigencies of the time – the lapse of tradition, the cultural chaos and the hostility of

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the environment.’34 If there is a concern with the present in Eliot, then, it is only in so far as the present is a falling away from (or in hostility to) the ‘unified sensibility’ of the mythical past, and only in so far as it is seen from the ‘points of view’ of that past. For Ashbery, Eliot’s present is the belated, decayed part of an overarching narrative of history: ‘a gasworks’ versus ‘the whole history of human thought’. At Harvard Ashbery would have experienced the Eliotic ‘Western Canon’ first-hand, and would have noticed how it tailed off as it neared the contemporary.35 What Eliot calls the ‘historical sense’, into the service of which a whole range of texts are put in The Waste Land, therefore, is a radical version of Quentin Skinner’s ‘mythology of coherence’ – different points of view on the same thing. For Ashbery at least, Eliot’s poetry is an attempt to insert oneself into the thought of the past and establish the inviolability of its points of view. * * * In ‘The Skaters’, Ashbery seeks to establish a point of view in the present itself. This is not easily done, of course – ‘Today is uncharted,’ as ‘SelfPortrait in a Convex Mirror’ notes. Difficulty is not necessarily alien to the present or its points of view, however. ‘The Skaters’ lays down a rhetoric of presence in its opening lines: These decibels Are a kind of flagellation, an entity of sound Into which being enters and is apart. (RM, 34)

The poem is concerned with the sound of the various voices (‘these decibels’) that it will go on to register. Written over a period of around a year between 1963 and 1964, ‘The Skaters’ charts the visitations of a number of such decibels, and remains Ashbery’s most polyphonous poem, containing allusions to Andrew Marvell, Daniel Defoe, David Hume, John Keats, J. W. M. Turner, Arthur Rimbaud, children’s books and folk ballads, Robert Frost, Eliot, Giacomo Meyerbeer’s opera Le Prophète and Jerry Lee Lewis, to name a few. These intertexts are not manipulated for use as contrast to contemporary society, but are, in accordance with the poem’s particular construction of the present, listened to within it. The central conflict of this strategy is made clear at the poem’s beginning. ‘Apart’ but also ‘a part’ of ‘an entity of sound’, the poet is torn between, on the one hand, being swept up in the continuous rhythm of sounds and, on the other, thinking about them in order to recognise that rhythm:

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True, melodious tolling does go in that awful pandemonium, Certain resonances are not utterly displeasing to the terrified eardrum. Some paroxysms are dinning of tambourine, others suggest piano room or organ loft For the most dissonant night charms us, even after death. This, after all, may be happiness: tuba notes awash on the great flood, ruptures of xylophone, violins, limpets, grace-notes, the musical instrument called serpent, viola de gambas, aeolian harps, clavicles, pinball machines, electric drills, que sais-je encore! The performance has rapidly reached your ear; silent and tear-stained, in the post-mortem shock, you stand listening, awash. (35)

The problem, then, is one of passivity. The danger of Ashbery’s listening is that ‘The human mind / Cannot retain anything except perhaps the dismal two-note theme / Of some sodden “dump” or lament’ (34). If Eliot is a too-active, overbearing participant in his tradition, an intertextuality that is simply ‘awash’ in its various discourses, as the poems of The Tennis Court Oath perhaps are, can hardly be said to offer a viable alternative. Ashbery is aware of the fact, and terms this impulse to ‘stand listening, awash’ the myth of ‘invisible writing’, using Eliot’s famous metaphor of the catalyst from ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ to explain the concept: But how luminous the fountain! Its sparks seem to aspire to reach the sky! And so much energy in those bubbles. A wise man could contemplate his face in them With impunity, but fools would surely do better not to approach too close Because any intense physical activity like that implies danger for the unwary and the uneducated. Great balls of fire! In my day we used to make ‘fire designs,’ using a saturated solution of nitrate of potash. Then we used to take a smooth stick, and using the solution as ink, draw with it on sheets of white tissue paper. Once it was thoroughly dry, the writing would be invisible. By means of a spark from a smoldering match ignite the potassium nitrate at any part of the drawing, First laying the paper on a plate or tray in a darkened room. The fire will smolder along the line of the invisible drawing until the design is complete. (49–50)

Acknowledging the intertextual nature of writing, its Babel ‘aspir[ing] to reach the sky’, Ashbery is none the less insistent on the creative powers of the fire as distinct from the lamely absorptive nature of the tissue paper. Though lampooning Romantic ideas of originary creative genius, ‘The Skaters’ none the less insists that ‘the fire demon’, Ashbery’s metaphor for it, must play a part in the world’s ‘resonances’. The poem’s

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environment, Ashbery continues, ‘is a scene worthy of the poet’s pen; yet it is the fire demon / Who has created it, throwing it up on the dubious surface of a phosphorescent fountain / For all the world like a poet’ (51). Such a contention clearly rejects the quasi-automatism of ‘Europe’, in which the poet is presented as more or less absent. But what is the precise nature of the ‘listening’ Ashbery goes on to do in ‘The Skaters’? ‘The Skaters’, rather than making strategic allusions or coolly affecting parody, hears snatches of lines in time. The discourses and memories surrounding the poem are constantly felt to ‘Clamber to join in the awakening / To take a further role in my determination’ (49). The textual world determines Ashbery’s poetic self rather than the other way around, but this time the mediating nature of this poetic self becomes explicitly thematised. Rather than arbitrary references and imitations, as in stereotypes of Ashbery based on Fredric Jameson’s characterisation of postmodern pastiche, Ashbery’s allusions in ‘The Skaters’ are manifestations of thinking, and more particularly of remembering and associating in a textual environment. Let us take a simple example. In speculating on the relationship of death and eternity, Ashbery is reminded of Marvell’s parallel lines figure. Ashbery writes, How strange that the narrow perspective lines Always seem to meet, although parallel (36),

basing his metaphor on Marvell’s ‘Definition of Love’: As lines (so loves) oblique may well Themselves in every angle greet: But ours so truly parallel, Though infinite, can never meet.36

The meaning of Marvell’s lines is in opposition to Ashbery’s, and undermines it. Unlike in Eliot, though, Marvell is not the counterpoint of unified sensibility to the waste land of Ashbery’s ‘middle-class apartment’ (56) in Paris. The allusion is there to heighten our impression of the unpredictable nature of such snatches of poems as resonances rather than symbolic rationalisations, and as a representation of what it is like to think through the past in simultaneity with the movement of the present (‘strange’ and imperfect). The fragmentary nature of ‘The Skaters’ is, then, essential to the poem’s movements; it has a fragmentary organisation quite alien to the fragmentary surface of The Waste Land, which is the aesthetic expression of decidedly non-fragmentary critical ideas. ‘The Skaters’ is in four sections, with each section ostensibly framing a certain voice. Part

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two, for example, relates a fantastical voyage in the spirit of Rimbaud’s ‘Drunken Boat’; the section itself shows signs of inebriation, however, as its flights of fancy digress into overlapping, clashing and ambiguous intertextual relationships, which the poem works out while entering into more and more complex arrangements (all further complicated by the poem’s real situation, ‘the middle-class apartment’ in which Ashbery feels ‘cut off from life in the streets’). We see this complexity in miniature in a sub-section of part two. Ashbery writes: The west wind grazes my cheek, the droplets come pattering down; What matter now whether I wake or sleep? The west wind grazes my cheek, the droplets come pattering down; A vast design shows in the meadow’s parched and trampled grasses. Actually a game of ‘fox and geese’ has been played there, but the real reality, Beyond truer imaginings, is that it is a mystical sign full of a certain significance, Burning, sealing its way into my consciousness. (54)

In order, then: Shelley, Keats, Shelley again, Yeats (‘vast design’), Stevens (‘the real reality / Beyond truer imaginings’), Wordsworth (‘sealing its way into my consciousness’), with the odd peppering from Ashbery’s ‘source’ for the poem, the children’s manual, Three Hundred Things a Bright Boy Can Do. Why this arrangement? The architecture of the poem seems to be based whimsically on the children’s book, following Ashbery’s conception of a poem as ‘a question of the relation between elements that are sort of given to one, or which one chooses arbitrarily when one starts to write a poem and which doesn’t require any other justification’.37 The book is hardly felicitous for explaining the meaning of these lines, however. The literary associations are where, so to speak, the poem gets serious. At these the poet first seems to pause, reimbibing the sound of the Shelley allusion. Is the Keats reference then a dead-end? It certainly reads like a non sequitur initially. Similarly, after the west wind and rain of Shelley we get some incompatible ‘parched’ grass. And here we see how the Keats reference – ‘Do I wake or sleep?’ – does have a specific resonance, and in fact explains the centrifugality of the passage, for the final allusion, to Wordsworth’s ‘a slumber did my spirit seal’, reveals the situation of the lines: the dream. Ashbery does not bring a ‘historical sense’ to bear on these Romantic themes; they are not the historical counterpoise to the alienated otherness of the present. Elsewhere, Ashbery facetiously takes Eliot’s notions of the importance of allusive contrast misleadingly introduced by the aphorism ‘immature poets imitate; mature poets steal’ to mean that the poet can

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simply import echoes into a poem and, to an extent, pass them off as one’s own thoughts: ‘better to steal than borrow, as Eliot more or less said,’ he writes in 1990.38 Eliot, of course, specifically warns that ‘you cannot take [something from a text] merely because it is a good phrase or a lovely image.’39 In ‘The Skaters’, however, it is very much the loveliness (or other effect) that constitutes the meaning of these allusions. The poem terms the figures it alludes to as simply ‘Masters of eloquence / Glisten[ing] on the pages of your book’ (63), writers whose power lies in their aurality, and are ‘justified’ in so far as that eloquence ‘seals’ its way into the thinking of the poem. The allusions, that is, operate in the poem in so far as they are thought through its present, not outside of it in a schematised historical sense. The allusions do not, in this sense, ‘require any other justification’, because they are justified in the poem’s own thinking. They are not, that is, representative, like Eliot’s ‘representatives of eastern and western asceticism’, Buddhism and St Augustine, conjured at the end of ‘The Fire Sermon’, but present.40 To adapt the words of Ashbery’s contemporary George Oppen, the aim is not to ‘prescribe’ the meaning of an allusion, but ‘to record the experience of thinking it’.41 The post- or even anti-Eliot bent of this approach in Ashbery is usefully articulated by Merle Brown, who, in his essay ‘Poetic Listening’, comes out firmly in favour of the later poet: Poets do not listen to themselves in their poems in an interpretive or hermeneutical way, although interpretation may be going on in a subsidiary manner within their distinctively poetic listening. The critic who substitutes his listening for the poetic listening of a poem blanks out its very life and inaugurates that long desiccating process of interpretation, that centrifugal spiral of allegorism away from the poem into vacuousness. Poetic listening, in contrast, is centripetal; it is a constant, living swathing of the expressiveness of the poem and is the source of the air that allows the poem to breathe. Poetic listening is the inner form of a poem.42

Eliot allegorises, Ashbery listens. This listening, though it is ‘the inner form’ or organising principle of the poem, is none the less embodied in an unorganised group of allusions based on the contingency of resonance. The effect is to give allusions localised meanings rather than an overall significance based on the coordinates of all references. As Ashbery suggests in his misreading of Eliot, we deal with fragments ‘by leaving them as they are’. When Ashbery speaks of his own ‘fondness for a polyphony of clashing styles, from highbred to demotic, in a given poem’ (RS, 243), therefore, this is realised in his poetry not as a pattern of allusions to the past which contrast with each other, but as the result of a poetry that expresses the multiplicity inhering in the act of reading.

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The movements of the poem from crackerbarrel journalism to David Hume, from children’s books to Rimbaud, are not to be read as an Eliotic game of chess, the patterning of points of view, but as the natural result of a poetry representing the presence of past literature in the mind, rather than the pastness of the present. Ashbery’s is an intertextuality of rhythm, not of symbolic unities. Time operates in Ashbery as contemporaneity. With this, we are returned to the ideas of attention laid out in the introduction to this book: Ashbery, that is, represents a ‘history of the present’ rather than Eliot’s history of Western civilisation. Rather than organising the past from on high with a historical sense to reveal its supposed inner workings, Ashbery uses the trope of inattention to allow the past to represent a picture of the mind in its present situation. In ‘The Skaters’, and its foundational metaphor of listening, Ashbery conceives of the present itself as rhythmic. In opposition to Eliot’s ideal of static aesthetic reception, where if we ‘understand it the first time, then . . . it can’t be much good’, as Eliot writes of the theatre, Ashbery writes a ‘poem / Which is in the form of falling snow’43: the individual flakes are not essential to the importance of the whole’s becoming so much of a truism That their importance is again called into question, to be denied further out, and again and again like this. Hence, neither the importance of the individual flake, Nor the importance of the whole impression of the storm, if it has any, is what it is, But the rhythm of the series of repeated jumps, from abstract into positive and back to a slightly diluted abstract. (39)

Such lines deny unity, and yet are not simply the ‘fragmented brilliance’ of ‘Europe’. The long poem for Ashbery is a ‘collection’, as the poem terms it, in which listening, and rehearing, are accumulated. ‘The articles we’d collect’ (34) are, of course, the enactment of Ashbery’s famous ‘putting it all in’ aesthetic, which is first named as such in ‘The Skaters’. Ashbery’s collection method, however, is not of the comprehensive nature demanded by Eliot, nor is its aim to act as a receptacle of tradition or create an overall symbolic economy. Nothing connects the multitudinous allusions of Ashbery’s poem in the way Ovid, Dante and Frazer are connected in The Waste Land. In Ashbery’s intertextuality of listening, it is the act of accumulation that is important. As ‘Daffy Duck in Hollywood’ tells its readers a decade later, ‘to be ambling on’s / The tradition more than the safe-keeping of it’ (HD, 34). Ashbery’s oftquoted remarks on the importance of music to him are revealing here:

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What I like about music is its ability of being convincing, of carrying an argument through successfully to the finish, though the terms of the argument remain unknown quantities. What remains is the structure, the architecture of the argument, scene or story. I would like to do this in poetry . . . But actually this is only a part of what I want to do, and I am not even sure I want to do it. I often change my mind about my poetry. I would prefer not to think I had any special aims in mind.44

It is not so much the allusions themselves that matter to Ashbery, but rather the musical ‘architecture’ they can represent. In this, Ashbery does not solve all the problems of allusion. He later says: ‘I stupidly hope there’ll be a kind of buzz given off by these references that readers will enjoy.’45 As in his criticism, Ashbery takes a ‘great deal on faith’ in his poetry, hoping his allusions can be ‘convincing’, even if they remain ‘unknown quantities’. This is in crucial contrast to Eliot. For in presenting allusion as the act of listening, Ashbery insists that he is with us in the act of interpretation: ‘I begin with unrelated phrases and notations that later on I hope get resolved in the course of the poem as it begins to define itself more clearly for me.’46 This brings us to the central question of allusion’s relationship with its readers. In so far, that is, as Ashbery hopes his readers will ‘be able to experience the poem without having to refer to outside sources to get the complete experience as one has to in Eliot sometimes or Pound’, as he says in 1972, Ashbery’s history of the present is an attempt to democratise intertextuality and place it on a broadly anti-symbolist footing.47 In Three Poems, Ashbery’s next major long work, the ‘idea’, Ashbery says, ‘was to allow all kinds of prose “voices” to have their say in what I hoped would be poetry.’48 In the act of making sure that the poetry of the past is ‘left intact, and given back’, as O’Hara put it, the reader gets a say too. * * * Eliotic allusion demands, as far as reading processes are concerned, recognition first and foremost. Eliot is anxious that his allusions be received correctly in a way that recognises the difference between the context of the allusion and the context of the poem. By this, Eliot can avoid the ‘steal[ing]’ that Ashbery’s ironically attributes to him. Eliot complains: In one of my early poems [‘Cousin Nancy’] I used, without quotation marks, the line ‘the army of unalterable law’ from a poem by George Meredith, and this critic accused me of having shamelessly plagiarised, pinched, pilfered that line. Whereas, of course, the whole point was that the reader should recognise where it came from and contrast it with the meaning of my own poem.49

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The further point here is that allusion can create a community of meaning in which the correct interpretation of references is a mark of a certain cultural status. The desire to locate a readership by allusive gestures is by no means unique to Eliot, of course. British Modernism, even on the Left, was dominated by, as Cecil Day Lewis expressed it, a desire to find a readership in a ‘tiny, isolated unit with which communication is possible, with whom he can take a certain number of things for granted’.50 However, Robert Graves and Laura Riding, another poet Ashbery greatly admires, were in no doubt as to where this left any kind of ‘public’ readership: ‘the modernist poet, left without any public but the highly trained literary connoisseur, does not hesitate to embody in his poems remote literary references which are unintelligible to the wider public and directly antagonise it.’51 To what extent Ashbery sees Eliot as antagonistic in this sense, and to what extent he sees him as pedagogical, is overridden by the fact that he views the two things as commensurate with each other. The pointed pedagogical objective of Eliot’s infamous notes to The Waste Land assume on the part of the reader ‘a willingness to be trained’, as Eliot praised Pound for assuming.52 The tutorial tone of some of the pointers Eliot gives to the reader in The Waste Land is clear enough, and obviously limits the reader’s role in the poem, whether Eliot is being ironic or not: ‘What Tiresias sees, in fact, is the substance of the poem’; ‘The collocation of these two representatives of eastern and western asceticism, as the culmination of this part of the poem, is not accidental.’53 The most striking antagonism in the notes, and something Eliot also favours in the poem proper, is the use of foreign languages. This is the case especially in a note referring the reader to Ovid, where twenty lines of Latin are reproduced, but also in many other instances (on Hesse, Baudelaire and Dante, for example). It is probably this that William Carlos Williams had in mind when he claimed that Eliot had ‘returned us to the classroom’ – that is, not in so much as his poem was educational itself, but in that it sent the reader off to develop a comprehensive scholarly knowledge before he could understand it.54 For Ashbery, similarly, The Waste Land is antagonistic in so far as it is pedagogical and authoritative; he later refers to a ‘Défense de toucher quality about Eliot’, adding ‘it was like something in a glass vitrine.’55 For Ashbery, the notes are part of a cruel-to-be-kind instruction in which the poem is not to be touched (or read) but absorbed for its teachings. Pound was able to suggest absurdly that The Waste Land’s obscurities were reducible to its four Sanskrit words, because the poem is fragmentary in so far as the loss of ‘unified sensibility’ is expressed in the lack of educational wherewithal of the average reader, which the poem, and the notes particularly, are involved in exposing.56

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These priorities are quite reversed in Ashbery. As Olson observes the dangers of Pound’s historical nostalgia in the context of an emerging picture of the Second World War and its Nazi Holocaust, Ashbery knows, less consciously perhaps, that he is living in a time where ‘tradition menaces the individual talent in ways undreamed of by T. S. Eliot,’ as he writes in 1966.57 At the beginning of Ashbery’s career in the 1940s, there were still critics like Northrop Frye to be found emphasising, in the shadow of poets like Eliot, Yeats and Pound, the necessity of ‘the properly instructed reader’.58 Just as Pound’s elitism had shown Olson where such assumptions could lead politically, Ashbery’s Harvard reading lists, and the early work of Lowell and his contemporaries (as well as the New Critical apparatus that accompanied both), had shown Ashbery where Eliot’s elitism could lead aesthetically. We are returned here to the issue of programmatic reading. Ashbery is insistent that no instruction in Frye’s sense is necessary. A journalist reports Ashbery’s response to a question by a young woman at a reading in 2005: ‘Not all of us in this room are poetry students,’ she said. ‘There are some of us who are fiction writers, and so I feel bad about the elementary nature of my question. I understand fiction, the way you can get absorbed in a book and get lost in a character, but I was wondering if you could help me to read poetry, because I find it very hard to get into and I was wondering if you might help me out.’ ‘Well, first of all you really don’t have to if you don’t want to,’ he told her gently. The students laughed. ‘As Marianne Moore says, I too dislike it; there are other things more important than all this fiddle. But if you’re liking it enough to pick it up and go ahead, maybe one thing would be to forget yourself while you’re reading it and not think that in order to appreciate it you have to have read a book about it. That’s the way I read. And if you’re not liking it put it aside, which I also do.’59

Ashbery’s letters from the 1950s and 1960s provide evidence of just such a reading practice. David Herd has written of the importance of ‘enthusiasm’ as a democratising allusive method in O’Hara and Schuyler; this applies less to Ashbery, but the aim here is a similar encouragement and liberation, embodied in the way that Ashbery promotes a method of reading, not a reading list or a set of essential themes. For there is, after all, instruction here, an attempt to teach ‘the way I read’; but this instruction is operating as an encouragement challenging the very notion of readerly instruction – a self-reliance acknowledging that, after all, not all of us are poetry students. Unsurprisingly, ‘The Skaters’ has its own nod to Eliot’s notes in its fabrication of citations: ‘Viz. “Rigg’s Farm, near Aysgarth, Wensleydale,” or the “Sketch at Norton” ’; ‘cf. Jeremy Taylor’. The researcher, Ashbery

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knows, is to be distinguished from the reader. Unlike Eliot’s responses to art, which are that of the scholar, Ashbery’s are much closer to what we might call, in contradistinction, the reader. Eliot’s allusive practice relies on the fact that no one else reads like him, a member of Pound’s ‘antennae of the race’. Ashbery’s poetry, on the other hand, attempts a universalism that imitates a situation of everyday reading, and is flexible to the demands of the quotidian implicit in this situation. Ashbery enacts how reading can be done. As in that revealing change of heart for the title of his Norton lectures from ‘The Other Tradition’ to ‘Other Traditions’, Ashbery puts forward a tradition that attempts to be, in the term of ‘The Skaters’, a ‘General Delivery’ (41). It would be a mistake, however, to equate this casualness with meaninglessness. It has been easy for critics both sympathetic and hostile to characterise Ashbery as postmodernism’s poet of the laissez-faire and status quo platitudes – writing a poetry in which ‘all that is left is to imitate dead styles, to speak through the masks,’ as in Fredric Jameson’s description of postmodern art.60 David Lehman does so precisely on the grounds of Ashbery’s differences with Eliot: ‘where Eliot’s sense of tradition is applied as a corrective to the modern world, Ashbery’s gladhanded “other tradition” furnishes him with so much raw material, no strings attached, nothing to acknowledge or be faithful to,’ he writes.61 This is, I think, to misunderstand the gesture behind Ashbery’s gladhandedness. Jameson’s characterisation, for example, is of postmodernity’s ‘imprisonment of the past’, and the imitation he speaks of in many ways follows on from Eliot’s own theory of ‘masks’. What Ashbery’s allusive mode represents, on the other hand, is a conscious attempt to return the past to the past, and the present to now. In this, Ashbery returns us to the present by placing himself alongside us in the act of interpretation (in what I have called listening with regard to ‘The Skaters’). Ashbery, as outlined in this study’s introduction, follows Dewey’s advice: ‘with the artist, there must be an ordering of the elements of the whole that is in form, although not in details, the same as the process of organization the creator of the work consciously experienced.’62 Making poetry from a position of the beholder, Ashbery’s writing listens to the past and presents it as poetry. The poet situates himself reading in a position analogous with the reader of his own poems. In placing the reader at the centre of the poem, Ashbery enforces a crucial break with Eliot that in turn represents a radical break with the author-centric poetics of the last two hundred years. For Eliot simply shifts the paradigm of the poet from inspired genius to erudite scholar, remaining a Romantic teacher of mankind in a new, professional sense of the word. As I have been arguing throughout this book, authority for Ashbery

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is happily undermined by what Leavis laments as the ‘hostility of environment’, the distracting (and for Leavis therefore bad) interference of the situation. While for most modernists environment is to be resisted and separated from the ‘truly’ meaningful experience of abstracted Tradition, for Ashbery the situation is to be embraced, attended and listened to. Allusion is, in this sense, the concentrated form of Ashbery’s style of reading, the purest manifestation of his ‘history of the present’. The implications of this, of course, go beyond allusion – it is easy to see the forms of allusive intertextuality established in ‘The Skaters’ as clearing the ground for the unique ekphrasis of ‘Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror’, or the juxtapositions of high and low culture in ‘Daffy Duck in Hollywood’ (HD, 31–4). Ashberyan allusion is, especially when read as a reading of Eliot, a symptom of Ashbery’s entire approach to his readers. The effect of mirroring, of Ashbery reading and us reading Ashbery, is of primary importance. Ashbery’s ‘program that is the absence of any program’ is in fact a fundamentally social conception of reading, that in turn results in a social, collaborative conception of the relationship between reader and poet. The dangers of this liberalism deteriorating into apathy are present, of course, as Ashbery recognises in ‘The Skaters’, but this is no more than part of our responsibility as readers. With these responsibilities in mind, Ashbery invites the reader into his allusions. We should not, however, neglect the positive role of Eliot in this achievement. In an interview for a British magazine in 1994, Ashbery said of his poetry, ‘I understand how it would puzzle and mystify readers. Especially readers who had neglected to read the modernist poets of this century’.63 Ashbery does not neglect Eliot. As his various descriptions of the poet suggest, Ashbery sees something redeemable in Eliot’s work. In ‘Loving Mad Tom’, a poem from Houseboat Days (1979) about Eliot, Ashbery acknowledges simultaneously the influence and departure he takes from modern poetry’s Elder Statesman, suggesting an Ashberyan poetics that was trying to get out of Eliot’s work: . . . sometimes Out of a pure, unintentional song, the meaning Stammered nonetheless, and your zeal could see To the opposite shore. (16)

The poem goes on to revise Eliot’s ‘way of putting it’ to ‘a way of getting here’ (17), alluding to Four Quartets. This seems to sum up Ashbery’s compromise with Eliot: the use of a radically allusive poetics for very different ends. Embryonically in the oversimplified accidentalism of ‘Europe’, and more fully in the developed and compelling contingency

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of rhythm in ‘The Skaters’, Ashbery’s transformation of Eliotic allusive strategies manifests itself as a move away from organisation and antagonism, towards a listening whose contemporaneity always has the reader in mind. Eliot somehow ‘unintentionally’ contributes to this allusive practice, but, just as importantly, his pedagogical ‘zeal’ is noted by Ashbery, who ultimately stands on the ‘opposite’ shore.

Notes 1. Andrew Crozier, who was to be instrumental in importing the New American Poetry to England, noted ‘the tradition that lies behind it – not that of Pound and Eliot but of Pound and Williams’ (Crozier and Tim Longville, A Various Art, p. 12). 2. Donald Allen, The New American Poetry, p. xi. 3. Ashbery’s later comments on both poets are interesting. ‘Williams’, Ashbery says in 1983, ‘is a poet I admire without feeling especially close to’ (letter to Emily Wallace, 24 March, Houghton Library, Harvard University). His feelings on Pound are far more clean-cut: I have never liked Pound, except for his early works. I met him once at the Spoleto Festival, in 1965 I believe; he read his poems in a thin, almost inaudible voice. Charles Olson introduced us: Pound looked at me in a ferocious manner and didn’t say a word to me. (Cited in John Shoptaw, On the Outside Looking Out, p. 48) 4. Marjorie Perloff, The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage, pp. 34, 13. 5. See James Longenbach, ‘Ashbery and the Individual Talent’. 6. Vernon Shetley, After the Death of Poetry: Poet and Audience in Contemporary America, p. 116. 7. Perloff, ‘Normalizing John Ashbery’. 8. John Cage, Silence, p. 129; see also Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation, pp. 3–14. 9. T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems 1909–1963, p. 79. 10. Grover Smith, T. S. Eliot’s Poetry and Plays: A Study in Sources and Meaning, p. 79. 11. Frank O’Hara, letter to Ashbery, 7 January 1960. Cited in Shoptaw, On the Outside Looking Out, p. 55. 12. John Tranter, ‘John Ashbery in Conversation’, p. 95. 13. Perloff, ‘Normalizing John Ashbery’. 14. Ben Hickman, ‘Out of the Ferment’, p. 80. Ashbery’s emphasis. 15. Louis Osti, ‘The Craft of John Ashbery’, p. 94. 16. William LeQueux, Beryl of the Biplane: Being the Romance of an Air Woman of Today, p. 61. 17. Janet Bloom and Robert Losada, ‘Craft Interview with John Ashbery’, p. 121. 18. John Ashbery, letter to Robert Nye, 14 November 1975, AM-6 (25), Houghton Library, Harvard University.

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130 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

John Ashbery and English Poetry Bloom and Losada, ‘Craft Interview with John Ashbery’, p. 83. Donald Davie, ‘Eliot in One Poet’s Life’, p. 223. Eliot, Selected Prose, pp. 40, 38. Ibid., p. 85. Michael Levenson, A Genealogy of Modernism: A Study of English Literary Doctrine, 1908–1922, p. 201. Richard Drain, ‘The Waste Land: The Prison and the Key’, p. 30. Eliot, Selected Prose, p. 38. Eliot, Essays Ancient and Modern, p. 102. Eliot, On Poetry and Poets, p. 145. Eliot, After Strange Gods, p. 29. O’Hara, Standing Still and Walking in New York, p. 24. Ibid, p. 129. Koch makes the same point more facetiously in his ‘Dead White Man Comics’, one of which has the protagonist’s skeletal frame swimming in books, shouting: ‘BOUHOUHAHAHA! ALL THE BOOKS ARE MINE! MINE! MINE!’ (The Art of the Possible, p. 88). Frank O’Hara, Jackson Pollock, p. 16. Eliot, ‘Ulysses, Order, and Myth’, in Selected Prose, p. 177. Eliot, ‘War-Paint and Feathers’, p. 1036. F. R. Leavis, How to Teach Reading: A Primer for Ezra Pound, p. 4. See Ashbery’s Harvard papers, which include the curriculum of most of his degree course, in the Houghton collection (see especially AM-6, Box 31). Andrew Marvell, Complete Poems, p. 50. Osti, ‘Craft of John Ashbery’, p. 87. Eliot’s exact words are: One of the surest of tests is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest. (Eliot, Selected Prose, p. 153)

39 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

Eliot, ‘The Bible as Scripture and as Literature’ (lecture). Eliot, Collected Poems, p. 84. George Oppen, Selected Prose, Daybooks, and Papers, p. 88. Merle Brown, ‘Poetic Listening’, p. 132. Eliot, article in New York Post, 22 September 1963. Quoted in Richard Howard, Alone with America: Essays on the Art of Poetry in the United States Since 1950, pp. 29–30. Quotation originally from 1964. Hickman, ‘Out of the Ferment’, p. 83. Bloom and Losada, ‘Craft Interview with John Ashbery’, pp. 118–19. Ibid., p. 123. Hickman, ‘Out of the Ferment’, p. 83. Eliot, article in The Bed Post: A Miscellany of the Yorkshire Post, pp. 43–4. Cecil Day Lewis, A Hope for Poetry, p. 37.

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51. Robert Graves and Laura Riding, A Survey of Modernist Poetry, p. 258. 52. Eliot, Selected Prose, p. 150. 53. Eliot, Collected Poems, p. 84. Pound makes similar gestures in Cathay, as in his famous footnote to ‘The Jewel Stair’s Grievance’: Note. – Jewel stairs, therefore a palace. Grievance, therefore there is something to complain of. Gauze stockings, therefore a court lady, not a servant who complains. Clear autumn, therefore he has no excuse on account of the weather. Also she has come early, for the dew has not merely whitened the stairs, but soaks her stockings. The poem is especially prized because she utters no direct reproach. 54 William Carlos Williams, Autobiography, p. 174. 55. Hickman, ‘Out of the Ferment’, p. 82. 56. The claim is in a letter from Pound to Amy Lowell, 1 August 1914. See Hugh Kenner, The Invisible Poet: T. S. Eliot, p. 151. 57. Ashbery, Selected Prose, p. 81. My italics. 58. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, p. 102. 59. Larissa MacFarquhar, ‘Present Waking Life’, p. 91. 60. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, p. 115. 61. Lehman, Beyond Amazement: New Essays on John Ashbery, p. 113. 62. John Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 54.” 63. David Herd, ‘John Ashbery “In Conversation” ’, p. 36.

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Chapter Five

The first and most important influence: Ashbery and Auden

Ashbery is surprised that no one ever considers his poetic relationship with W. H. Auden. In 1983 he responded to an interviewer’s question: ‘It’s odd to be asked today what I saw in Auden. Forty years ago when I first began to read modern poetry no one would have asked – he was the modern poet.’1 Auden’s current exclusion from histories of post-war American poetry has seen him marginalised in discussions of Ashbery. If we view Ashbery in the 1940s context of his early career, however, Auden’s presence in his work seems far less peripheral. Auden cast a huge shadow over American verse before and after he moved to the US in 1939. A list of American poets under Auden’s influence in the 1940s and 1950s could be a who’s-who of post-war American poetry, including figures ranging from Robert Lowell and James Merrill to Robert Duncan and Frank O’Hara. For Ashbery, however, Auden was not, as in the case of these poets, simply one among a number of other twentiethcentury influences, but the influential figure in his career. ‘W. H. Auden’, Ashbery muses in Other Traditions, was ‘chronologically the first and therefore the most important influence’ (OT, 4) on him. Throughout his career, Ashbery has been at pains to stress the singular influence of Auden: ‘it was Auden who ultimately became for me the modern poet, the one I hoped most to emulate’ (Robert Frost Medal speech, SPr, 247). Such comments are a response to the critical project of establishing a distinctly Stevensian strain in his work. ‘I think [Auden] played a much more important role in my formation as a poet than other poets I have been associated with, such as Stevens,’ Ashbery has said.2 Though such statements have been taken as proof of guilt by the most influential promoter of Stevens as Ashbery’s ‘poetic father’, Harold Bloom, the claims at least warrant investigation.3 While discussions of Ashbery’s debt to Stevens are many, however, the critical discourse on Ashbery’s relationship with Auden extends to just one book chapter by a British critic, and a recent essay on the pair’s shared homotextuality.4

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When Auden awarded the Yale Younger Poets Prize to Some Trees in 1956, having personally accepted the late and informal submission of Ashbery’s first collection for consideration, Ashbery’s poetry already had a rich and complicated relationship with the older poet. Ashbery began reading Auden in 1944, at the age of seventeen, on the advice of a family friend, and immediately, he recalls, ‘became mad about it’.5 Auden’s ‘role’, then (and specifically the early, ‘English’ Auden), is in the first instance something akin to a first love; Auden captivates Ashbery. Ashbery, indeed, recalls being ‘completely smitten’ with Auden, who was his ‘first literary crush’.6 Ashbery eventually wrote his undergraduate thesis on Auden at Harvard, but it seems he was very far from any critical distance at the time he met the older poet in 1947. Recalling his first encounter with Auden, whom he would come to know well, Ashbery says it was hard for him to rationalise his reaction: It was very hard to talk to him since he already knew everything. I once said to Kenneth Koch, ‘What are you supposed to say to Auden?’ And he said that about the only thing there was to say was ‘I’m glad you’re alive.’7

Ashbery first collection, then, was not simply written for the judge of the Yale competition, but very much out of an engrossed reading of his work. The presence of Auden in Some Trees is so palpable that it seems superfluous to demonstrate it. Ashbery’s early crush shows forth in the collection in a manner clearly revealing his early hope ‘to emulate’ Auden. Much of the collection engages with Auden, that is, in so far as it imitates him. Parts of Some Trees now seem anomalous in Ashbery’s œuvre for this reason. These are mainly pieces that deal with ‘An unendurable age’ (ST, 21), taking on the classic Auden theme of adolescence in the unmistakable tones of the ‘Audenesque’: Now father cut me down with tears. Plant me far in my mother’s image To do cold work of books and stones. (‘Eclogue’, 13) I’ll do what the raids suggest, Dad, and that other livid window, But the tide pushes an awful lot of monsters And I think it’s my true fate. (‘A Boy’, 20) That is how I came nearer To what was on my shoulder. One day you were lunching With a friend’s mother; I thought how plebeian all this testimony That you might care to crave that, somehow Before I would decide. (‘The Way They Took’, 66)

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The Freudian architecture here, so evidently inspired by Auden, is something unfamiliar to readers of Ashbery’s subsequent work. The imitation is not simply a question of subject matter, however. Ashbery’s early communicative medium is based on Auden’s use of mysterious telegraphese and treacherous syntax, his insertions of unrelated clauses and fragmented landscape elements for an effect of intrigue and foreboding. This untitled poem from Auden’s first book sets a tonal, as well as thematic, benchmark for the poems above, and much else in Some Trees: Nor was that final, for about that time Gannets blown over northward, going home, Surprised the secrecy beneath the skin. ‘Wonderful was that cross and I full of sin. Approaching, utterly generous, came one For years expected, born only for me.’ Returned from that dishonest country, we Awake, yet tasting the delicious lie: And boys and girls, equal to be, are different still. No, these bones shall live, while daffodil And saxophone have something to recall Of Adam’s brow and the wounded heel.8

Poems in Some Trees like ‘Grand Abacus’ or ‘Album Leaf’ extend this abbreviated manner to themes less obviously Audenesque. Even some of the disjunctiveness of The Tennis Court Oath, in poems like ‘The Ascetic Sensualists’ or ‘Two Sonnets’, can be seen as an extension of Auden’s more modest fragmentary address. In this stylistic emulation Ashbery moves closer to a more lasting appropriation of Auden, one that goes beyond simple imitation. The best poems from Some Trees focus their attention on Auden’s manner. Ashbery’s undergraduate thesis on Auden, written in 1949, introduces some of the particulars of this focus.9 Entitled ‘The Poetic Medium of W. H. Auden’, Ashbery’s discussion of Auden considers issues of style in an argument stressing that the manner of Auden’s poetry cannot be detached from its meaning in ‘a false division between form and content’. Auden, Ashbery says, ‘could never be expected to have created a style which is an article, useless and decorative, to be left around to clutter up the meaning of a poem’, but is, rather, a poet who transforms style to the extent that it becomes the content of his work. The quality of Auden’s ‘many styles’ is to construct a ‘vast, hygienic self-consciousness’, and more particularly one in possession of an ‘intense awareness of exactly what the average reader takes for granted’. The subject in the

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form, therefore, is communication. For Ashbery, that is, Auden thematises the ‘poetic medium’ itself. This function of such an Audenesque medium can be seen in one of Some Trees’ shortest poems, ‘The Grapevine’ (ST, 19). ‘The Grapevine’ is heavily reliant on Auden’s early, ‘coded’ poems of unsolvable mystery, as exemplified in another untitled poem, later called ‘The Secret Agent’. Here are the two pieces together: Control of the passes was, he saw, the key To this new district, but who would get it? He, the trained spy, had walked into the trap For a bogus guide, seduced with the old tricks. At Green hearth was a fine site for a dam And easy power, had they pushed the rail Some stations nearer. They ignored his wires: The bridges were unbuilt and trouble coming. The street music seemed gracious now to one For weeks up in the desert. Woken by water Running away in the dark, he often had Reproached the night for a companion Dreamed of already. They would shoot, of course, Parting easily who were never joined.10 – Of who we and all they are You all now know. But you know After they began to find us out we grew Before they died thinking us the causes Of their acts. Now we’ll not know The truth of some still at the piano, though They often date from us, causing These changes we think we are. We don’t care Though, so tall up there In young air. But things get darker as we move To ask them: Whom must we get to know To die, so you live and we know? (ST, 19)

The shared atmosphere of intrigue here formalises the issue of communication. ‘The Secret Agent’ troubles both the attribution of agency, and basic assumptions of verbal address. Who, we ask, is speaking here? And who is being spoken to? Who is the ‘one’? Who or what ‘ignored his wires’, ‘were never joined’? Ashbery’s poem exaggerates this tendency towards the ambiguity of agents: in his poem, all pronouns are subject to confusion by dint of a speaker, in the words of Some Trees’ opening poem, ‘not of singular authority’ (9). In Ashbery’s compendious

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case of Chinese whispers we get a feeling that the pronouns have been changed, but by whom? The ambiguities are rife: after they found us we grew, yet they die thinking us the causes of their acts; they also simultaneously date from us and cause what we think we are; while the ‘you’ knows ‘all’ about them, the ‘we’ is seemingly in the dark about everything: the truth of some still at the piano, how to die, whom they must get to know, and what ‘we know’ in the intransitive sense; and finally, they (‘we’) can only ‘think’ of who they are, while the ‘you’ knows (yet the we knows that the you knows). In both poems, foreboding takes the form of the ‘secret’. Ashbery’s speaks of an ‘awareness of impenetrable mystery, which persists throughout [Auden’s] poetry’, a paradoxical knowledge of mystery by which, in a classic Ashberyan ‘shield of a greeting’, the poet protects meaning at the same time as he opens it up to the reader. Meaning, that is, is not under surveillance by the poet, who invites interpretations that he cannot refute; and yet his open invitation is itself guarded in some sense. Reticence, that is, is allowed to mean in and of itself. Edward Mendelson’s point about the early Auden is one Ashbery also reads into the poet: ‘the absence of a clue is the clue itself. The poems’ central subject is their own failure to be part of any larger interpretative frame.’11 Like ‘The Secret Agent’, the thematisation of intrigue in ‘The Grapevine’ is primarily a formal performance of that intrigue. Address, or how poets speak to readers, is where Some Trees locates Auden. In the broadest terms, both Auden and Ashbery approach the issue of address by simultaneously performing and thematising it; they successfully address in so far as they speak about address, and vice versa. ‘The Grapevine’ continues Auden’s work quite directly in this sense, exploring the problems of communication, symbolised in the figure of the grapevine, by communicating in a highly problematic manner. It is when such problems are allowed to perform the very possibility of poetic address that we see Ashbery’s most fruitful development and transformation of Auden. This is the case in Ashbery’s famous title poem in Some Trees. Here is a poem Auden wrote in 1927 and later called ‘The Letter’, and ‘Some Trees’, written just before Ashbery’s thesis on Auden, in 1948: From the very first coming down Into a new valley with a frown Because of the sun and a lost way, You certainly remain: to-day I, crouching behind a sheep-pen, heard Travel across a sudden bird, Cry out against the storm, and found

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The year’s arc a completed round And love’s worn circuit re-begun, Endless with no dissenting turn. Shall see, shall pass, as we have seen The swallow on the tile, Spring’s green Preliminary shiver, passed A solitary truck, the last Of shunting in the Autumn. But now, To interrupt the homely brow, Thought warmed to evening through and through Your letter comes, speaking as you, Speaking of much but not to come. Nor speech is close nor fingers numb If love not seldom has received An unjust answer, was deceived. I, decent with the seasons, move Different or with a different love, Nor question overmuch the nod, The stone smile of this country god That never was more reticent, Always afraid to say more than it meant.12 – These are amazing: each Joining a neighbor, as though speech Were a still performance. Arranging by chance To meet as far this morning From the world as agreeing With it, you and I Are suddenly what the trees try To tell us we are: That their merely being there Means something; that soon We may touch, love, explain. And glad not to have invented Some comeliness, we are surrounded: A silence already filled with noises, A canvas on which emerges A chorus of smiles, a winter morning. Placed in a puzzling light, and moving, Our days put on such reticence These accents seem their own defense. (ST, 51)

The poems’ common ground, besides an identical rhyme scheme, lies in what they hold back: the specific romantic situation, the sex and

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sexuality of the parties involved, the long-term implications of the events, and so on. The lover doubles as reader in both poems. Auden’s poem, ‘reticent, / Always afraid to say more than it meant’, affects by what it doesn’t say; the consolation of the ‘country god’, and finally the poem, comes from its tactful reticence, a pliability that allows a favourable interpretation for the poet. That is, the landscape, in its very lack of self-imposed meaning, can be freely interpreted as empathising with the pained ‘close’ speech and ‘numb[ness]’ of a speaker now happily ‘decent with the seasons’. This reticence is echoed in ‘Some Trees’, where the fact that we are ‘suddenly what the trees try // To tell us we are’ means that the presentation here, the ‘still performance’, is sufficient: ‘These accents seem their own defense.’ With a speaker ‘glad not to have invented / Such comeliness’, the poem attempts to recreate the reluctance to interfere in the event of love. Indeed, even reticence itself goes unspecified as ‘such reticence’. Like the ‘stone smile’ of Auden’s poem, ‘Some Trees’ makes an invitation that is attractive by dint of its very reticence. The self-limiting authorship of both poems, the simultaneously unspoken and invitational address, creates the paradoxical situation ‘Some Trees’ describes: ‘A [writerly] silence already filled with [readerly] noises’. In both ‘The Letter’ and ‘Some Trees’, we are party to a reticence of intention: not ‘question[ing] overmuch the nod’, both poets are constrained to an interpretation that the scene simply ‘mean[s] something’. Auden, even in Ashbery’s earliest work, emerges as central to Ashbery’s conception of his readers. * * * Reticence is a central concept in Ashbery’s adaptation of Auden. If no two twentieth-century poets have made manner more central to their poetic achievement, neither have they made reticence so central to their poetic manner. Much has been written of the homotextual forces at play in Ashbery’s poetics of reticence, as commentators have found in Ashbery’s forms of address an attempt to figure the secrecy implicit in homosexuality.13 According to Ashbery, though, the aims of his reticence are more inclusive than this reading would suggest: Well, if my poetry is oblique, it’s because I want to slant it at as wide an audience as possible, odd as it may come out in practice. Therefore, if I’m writing a love poem it won’t talk about specifics but just about the general feeling which anybody might conceivably be able to share.14

Such an address, characterised by the withholding of information, is not the Romantic irony that commentators on homotextuality want to claim

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for Ashbery – it is not a function of artistic expression. It is, rather, a paradoxical form of openness that begins to trouble, through its ‘slant’ manner, the aesthetic categories of inside and out, of self-expression and readerly response. In this sense, we should read Ashbery’s conception of reticence or ‘slanting’ as part of a wider aesthetic of good manners in his work. Ashbery’s response to an interviewer in the early 1980s is revealing in this regard: Interviewer: Do you like to tease or play games with the reader? Ashbery: I guess it depends on what you mean by ‘tease’. It’s all right if it’s done affectionately, though how can this be with someone you don’t know? I would like to please the reader, and think that surprise has to be an element of this, and that may necessitate a certain amount of teasing. To shock the reader is something else again. That has to be handled with great care if you’re not going to alienate and hurt him, and I’m firmly against that, just as I disapprove of people who dress with that in mind – dye their hair blue and stick safety pins through their noses and so on. The message here seems to be merely aggression – ‘hey you can’t be part of my strangeness’ sort of thing. At the same time I try to dress in a way that is just slightly off, so the spectator, if he notices, will feel slightly bemused but not excluded, remembering his own imperfect mode of dress.15

The clothing analogy is bizarre but significant. Though the idea of ‘teas[ing] affectionately’ seems to support a sexualised relationship between reader and writer in Ashbery’s work, the poet is getting at something quite different here. What Ashbery says pertains to the purely Platonic: ‘care’, inclusion, non-aggression, an effort to please. In essence, because the affectionate attitude is always addressed towards ‘someone you don’t know’, it is best said with good manners.16 There is something unique about the polite avant-garde figure Ashbery so fundamentally is. Geoff Ward’s suggestion that Ashbery is ‘probably the least likely person in the world to grow an Old Testament beard and appear on stage playing primitive instruments’ is about right, but the primitive is only one of a number of confrontational avant-garde positions rejected by Ashbery.17 The achievement of his good-mannered poetry is not, however, simply a matter of abiding by conventions. Ashbery’s strange metaphor of clothing describes the desire to dress without affront but none the less ‘slightly off’. If the word dress has its origin in the Latin directus, ‘making straight’, then Ashbery’s is a poetry seeking to make itself ‘slant’ by not giving directions. Its address (‘guide towards straightness’), that is, must seek to be inclusive but also reticent, teasing but not shocking, leaving the reader ‘bemused but not excluded’. As a form of dress, Ashbery implies, a poetic style is something that

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explicitly identifies with the reader’s own ‘imperfect mode’; it should be unconventional, ‘slightly off’, but only as a means to engage the reader. ‘A poem that communicates something that’s already known to a reader is not really communicating anything to him, and in fact shows a lack of respect,’ Ashbery notes elsewhere: ‘It’s a veiled insult to the reader.’18 That Ashbery finds an example of such address in Auden is easily seen. Ashbery’s thesis marvels at Auden’s ‘intense awareness of exactly what the average reader takes for granted and what appears to him as novel’, and both ‘The Grapevine’ and ‘Some Trees’ experiment with the possibilities of these readerly responses, addressing their readers with the reticent but inclusive style that Ashbery sees in Auden. Ashbery’s reading of Auden is slightly off itself, however. Within Ashbery’s inclusive conception of dress and poetic address is an ambiguous relationship with the conventional that Auden’s early work far from shares. We need only recall the simultaneously careless and careful poetics outlined in Ashbery’s great poem, ‘Soonest Mended’, to see the linked fate of ‘sowing the seeds crooked in the furrow’ and being a ‘good citizen’ (‘brushing the teeth and all that’) in Ashbery’s poetics – to see, that is, how Ashbery’s slantness depends on a certain compliance with convention in order to remain ‘affectionate’. What is missing in Ashbery’s reading of Auden, that is, can be simply expressed as the enemy: a powerful presence in Auden that disrupts and undermines all poetic addresses, calling for a response going far beyond Ashbery’s ambitions to ‘please the reader’. ‘Auden does not fit. Auden is no gentleman. Auden does not write, or exist, by any of the codes’: so wrote Geoffrey Grigson in the 1937 double number of New Verse devoted to the ‘Vin Audenaire’.19 Despite Auden’s not following the codes, Grigson is one of many early fans of Auden’s work, and it is initially perplexing to think about how an ungentlemanly, unfitting writing can charm. It is not, though, an accidental rudeness on Auden’s part that prompts Grigson to his description; rather, Auden’s impoliteness stems from how he reflexively thematises questions of manner, and consciously interrogates what a ‘code’ might be in the first place. Superficially, a high level of questioning, needling, imperatives – of direct speech – is one of Auden’s callingcards. Even the section titles of two of his longest works, The Orators and The Sea and the Mirror, show this central stylistic concern: ‘[Public] Address’, ‘Argument’, ‘Statement’, ‘Letter’, ‘Journal’, ‘Odes’, ‘The stage manager to the Critics’, ‘Prospero to Ariel’, ‘The Supporting Cast, Sotto Voce’, ‘Caliban to the Audience’, ‘ariel to Caliban. Echo by the prompter’. Exploring questions of authority and artistic address in

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the medium of oratory and stagecraft, these two works, unsurprisingly, make up Ashbery’s favourite Auden. Two of Auden’s early pieces, poems XXII and XXIII of Poems – ‘Will you turn a deaf ear’ (later called ‘The Questioner Who Sits So Sly’) and ‘Sir, no man’s enemy, forgiving all’ (later ‘Petition’) – show the classic exchange Auden enacts between reader and writer in his early work. Both poems enter into immediate dialogue with an explicitly identified reader, and yet the style of address in these poems is far from conversational. Here is the beginning of ‘Will you turn a deaf ear’: Will you turn a deaf ear To what they said on the shore, Interrogate their poises In their rich houses; Of stork-legged heaven-reachers Of the compulsory touchers The sensitive amusers And masked amazers? Yet wear no ruffian badge Nor lie behind the hedge Waiting with bombs of conspiracy In arm-pit secrecy; Carry no talisman For germ or the abrupt pain Needing no concrete shelter Nor porcelain filter. Will you wheel death anywhere In his invalid chair, With no affectionate instant But his attendant?20

Questioning, the poem immediately imposes itself on the reader: ‘Will you turn a deaf ear’ to me?, the speaker seems to ask. The question is a common unit in Auden’s early work, but how far is our response properly invited to these questions? Who is this speaker? Is he addressing himself? The first two questions of the poem seem to be rhetorical calls to action, and yet the third, fourth and fifth, though still rhetorical questions, undermine this urgency, calling for a different response through the irony of their ruffian badges, lying behind hedges and wheeling death around in his invalid chair. In addition to the hurried, bombarding quality of their delivery, all the enquiries seem to preclude response because of their heavily rhetorical manner. The speaker eventually answers his questions for us, but again with sly irony: ‘A neutralising

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peace / And an average disgrace / Are honour to discover / For later other.’ It is probably its later title that gives the lie to the poem: we are invited, that is, to ‘interrogate’ what is said by the speaker, and question the neutral ‘poises’ of his apparently inclusive address. The speaker rightly claims neutrality in so far as he allows no single rhetorical argument to win out, but such neutrality is implicated as an ulterior motive for a ‘neutralising peace’ in the poem. Auden, that is, invites the reader to question questioning itself, to interrogate the passive armchair politics of the rhetorician as distinguished from the man of action. Auden asks us if we will ‘turn a deaf ear’ to the duplicitous rhetoric of such cajoling speakers, spoken from the safety of the shore. Paradoxically, it is the false dialogue the questioner conducts that invites the reader to enter into a dialogue with the poem. ‘Sir, no man’s enemy’ is another poem apparently demanding direct response. Here is the poem in its entirety: Sir, no man’s enemy, forgiving all But will his negative inversion, be prodigal: Send to us power and light, a sovereign touch Curing the intolerable neural itch, The exhaustion of weaning, the liar’s quinsy, And the distortions of ingrown virginity. Prohibit sharply the rehearsed response And gradually correct the coward’s stance; Cover in time with beams those in retreat That, spotted, they turn though the reverse were great; Publish each healer that in city lives Or country houses at the end of drives; Harrow the house of the dead; look shining at New styles of architecture, a change of heart.21

Again, it is how the reader considers himself addressed that determines meaning. As both plea and imperative (‘be prodigal’, ‘prohibit’, ‘correct’), the poem implicates the reader in a world-transforming action. Hence the ‘change of heart’: it is in personal action that universal action takes place. As a result, the pronouns overlap, with the ‘sir’ being part of the ‘us’ in ‘send to us’, the ‘rehearsed response’ being the reader’s, and the ‘coward’s stance’ one’s own. The poem, that is, explores the interdependency of individuals while emphasising the power of individual agency, and does so through an address to the reader that includes, potentially, the all-powerful everyone. The invocation, then, is indeed to be an enemy to, and to be unforgiving of ‘ingrown virginity’, ‘the rehearsed response’ and ‘the coward’s stance’. Despite the poem’s beginning, like ‘The Questioner Who Sits So Sly’ and much of Auden’s

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early work, the relationship set up here between poet and addressee is premised on, and complicated by, the presence of an ‘enemy’. An Ashbery poem, similar in manner, shows the fundamental difference in Ashbery’s vocatives. This is ‘The Recent Past’, from Ashbery’s third collection, Rivers and Mountains: Perhaps we ought to feel with more imagination. As today the sky 70 degrees above zero with lines falling The way September moves a lace curtain to be near a pear, The oddest device can’t be usual. And that is where The pejorative sense of fear moves axles. In the stars There is no longer any peace, empties like a cup of coffee Between the blinding rain that interviews. You were my quintuplets when I decided to leave you Opening a picture book the pictures were all of grass Slowly the book was on fire, you the reader Sitting with specs full of smoke exclaimed How it was a rhyme for ‘brick’ or ‘redder.’ The next chapter told all about a brook. You were beginning to see the relation when a tidal wave Arrived with sinking ships that spelled out ‘Aladdin.’ I thought about the Arab boy in his cave But the thoughts came faster than advice. If you knew that snow was a still toboggan in space The print could rhyme with ‘fallen star.’ (RM, 23)

As in Auden, the reader is directly addressed as such here, as well as forming the poem’s theme. Like Auden’s work, with its concern with deaf ears and rehearsed responses, ‘The Recent Past’ invites us to consider both the method of address and the terms of our reception. The opening line, ‘Perhaps we ought to feel with more imagination’, for instance, considers both. The detective puzzle from the earlier poems remains, but takes on an aspect that more specifically concerns reading, as in the omitted but crucial rhymes for ‘brick’ and ‘redder’ (probably ‘book’ and ‘reader’). Unlike Auden’s poems, though, ‘The Recent Past’ does not enter into antagonism with the reader in this encoding. The address is affectionate: ‘You were my quintuplets when I decided to leave you.’ Indeed, the poem is positively apologetic; it has rightly been seen as Ashbery’s commentary on the failure of The Tennis Court Oath’s disjunctive address, as the poet now asks to be excused for its ‘oddest device[s]’ in which the ‘sense of fear moves axles’. The ‘sense of fear’ is something Auden, on the other hand, makes his business. Unlike Auden, Ashbery is concerned with the epistemological rather than the political issues of reception – of describing ‘lines’ rather than states ‘falling’. That

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‘thoughts came faster than advice’ is a comment on the experience of reader and writing itself, rather than the extension of questions about poetic authority to wider issues of power. In this, Ashbery’s poem makes the focus of interpretation specifically literary compared to the important ideological issues at stake in Auden’s warning against ‘rehearsed response’. It is clear from ‘The Recent Past’ that the relationship between reader and writer has no enemy in its coordinates for Ashbery. Though it is the political, English Auden that Ashbery embraces, Ashbery’s own manner of address is possible because he finds a way of reading Auden’s early work while eschewing its politics. * * * This is not to say that Ashbery eschews the political itself in his poetic address. What Ashbery does not ignore in Auden’s work is the English poet’s radical conception of poetic authority, however much he resists the wider application of it to immediate political problems. Critical discussions of the democratic impulse of Ashbery’s work, as embodied in an abnegation of authorship’s mastery, abound.22 The principal argument advanced is that Ashbery transfers the power of meaning from the singularity of the author to the egalitarian multiplicity of a readership. There is surely truth in this contention; this book has argued, similarly, that there is a dialectic relationship between reading and writing opening a space for readerly participation in Ashbery’s work – this is what I have termed ‘inattention’. What the critical narrative does not explain, though, is why democracy is the opposite of a controlling authority, how Ashbery might specifically make it so by the manner of his poetic address, or why an ‘open’ authorial stance might be a desirable thing. If one wishes to equate the aesthetic with the political, one must also account for the changing historical senses of authority and democracy over the course of Ashbery’s career; both are very different things in the 1950s to what they are in the 1990s. One reason for reading Ashbery’s sense of authority in relation to Auden is that it sends us back to the twentieth century’s first fascination with the non-authoritative author, a fascination whose objectives were not necessarily democratic. Such a reading can help bring out the contradictions inherent in the figure of the self-abnegating poet, allowing us to go beyond the uncritical equation of diminished poetic authority with democracy. Auden’s sense of authorship is undoubtedly informed by his sense of authority and individualism generally – that is, by his early reading of Marx. Auden’s understanding of the way in which literary texts and human subjects are constituted by ideological discourse is crucial to the originality of his early work. Of principal interest to Ashbery, though, is

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how, despite its political commitment, Auden is aware of the dangers of an exclusively didactic poetry claiming an unmediated or autonomous authority.23 A literary text’s meaning, Auden says, ‘is the outcome of a dialogue between the words of a poem and the response of whoever is listening to them. Not only is every poem unique, but its significance is unique for each person who responds to it.’ Propaganda, on the other hand, says Auden, attempts no such dialogue, but simply to persuade of its own will.24 This distinction is most comprehensively explored in what was probably the first Auden book that Ashbery read, The Orators (1932).25 Questions of address need to be considered constantly when reading The Orators. This is clear immediately after the book’s prologue, in ‘Address for a Prize Day’: All of you must have found out what a great help it is, before starting on a job of work, to have some sort of scheme or plan in your mind beforehand. Some of the senior boys, I expect, will have heard of the great Italian poet Dante, who wrote that very difficult but wonderful poem, The Divine Comedy . . . Now this afternoon I want, if I may, to take these three divisions [of sinners] and apply them to ourselves. In this way, I hope, you will be able to understand better what I am driving at.26

This kind of oratorical irony (here at the expense of Eliot) is audibly echoed in Ashbery’s own poems of public address – for example, 1970’s ‘Definition of Blue’: ‘The rise of capitalism parallels the advance of romanticism / And the individual is dominant until the close of the nineteenth century. / In our own time, mass practices have sought to submerge the personality’ (DDS, 53). However, it is not satire or even irony that makes either Auden’s or Ashbery’s work distinctive, but the difficulty of identifying such elements. Central to the exploration of authority in The Orators, that is, are questions of interpretation. As the opening paragraph of ‘Address for a Prize-Day’ asks: ‘What does it mean? What does it mean? Not what does it mean to them, there, then. What does it mean to us, here now? It’s a facer, isn’t it boys? But we’ve all got to answer it.’27 A sense of the manifold possible significances of the fragments that make up The Orators is at the centre of reading the book, if nothing else is. The reader’s interpretation of the individual orators, as friend or enemy, decides the meaning of their speech. Such interpretation is not easy in The Orators, however, because of Auden’s radical positioning of himself, the poet, in the work. Auden’s dilemma is that while attempting to initiate dialogue with a reader, he must react to a period in which the very idea of a readership for poetry, as we saw in the previous chapter,

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has become problematic.28 The crucial question of ‘Address for a Prize Day’ is ‘What sort of people are we living with now?’29 The problem, as Richard Hoggart points out, is that Auden ‘is far from clear as to whom he is addressing himself’.30 The strategy of The Orators is to short-circuit this problem by displacing the author from the position of ‘he who does the addressing’ to a role one step removed from the reader, somewhere behind his characters, but forcing a dialogue with him or her for this reason. Against other currents in Anglo-American Modernism, it is by a limitation of authority that Auden is able to position the politics of The Orators and create a dialogue with the reader. Auden not only introduces a multiplicity of speakers in The Orators, but also entirely obscures the relationship of each with any central voice. If there is one thing one can say about any ‘enemy’ in The Orators, then, it is that he assumes a position of authority. ‘He means what he says,’ Auden writes: Three kinds of enemy speech – I mean – quite frankly – speaking as a scientist, etc. Three signs of an enemy letter – underlining – parentheses in brackets – careful obliteration of cancelled expressions.31

Here, the reader is warned against falling into the trap of enemy textual closure, and is confronted by the possibility that any confident interpretations on his or her part are likely to be the result of an enemy ruse. It is in opposition to the meaning constructed through frankness, authority, professionalism, emphasis, parenthesis and censorship that The Orators works. If Auden is antagonistic to his readers, it is by ‘speaking as a scientist’ that one genuinely excludes them. In the words of one of Auden’s orators, ‘Practical jokes consist in upsetting these associations. They are in every sense contradictory and public.’32 By this, then, we are returned to Grigson’s comments about Auden not playing by the ‘codes’. Auden’s is an attempt to ‘initiate’ the reader, with all this word implies – that is, a simultaneously violent and inclusive gesture. The principal device for this initiation is the list. Parataxis is Auden’s method for achieving a limited authority, fit for dialogue, but which does not also resign itself to a passiveness to which readers are able to ‘turn a deaf ear’. The list operates as a straightforward mode for most of The Orators’ set-pieces. There is a prayer detailing whom deliverance is to be ‘from’ and ‘for’; two sections that catalogue random attributes of people (‘One has prominent eyes . . . One is obeyed by dogs . . . One can do cart wheels before theatre queues,’ and so on);

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there are many practical lists, such as the Airman’s catalogue of enemy giveaways; there are shopping lists for weaponry, to-do lists; there is even a run-off of the ‘Sedburgh School XV’ rugby line-up of 1927.33 Parataxis is also, however, the primary method of all parts of the poem, even, as with the ‘Journal of an Airman’, in apparently introductory material: A system organises itself, if interaction is undisturbed. Organisation owes nothing to the surveyor. It is in no sense pre-arranged. The surveyor provides just news. The effect of the enemy is to introduce inert velocities into the system (called by him laws or habits) interfering with organisation. These can only be removed by friction (war). Hence the enemy’s interest in peace societies. Nothing shows the power of the enemy more than that while the fact that a state of tension seeks to relieve itself seems to us perfectly obvious, an orderly arrangement, the natural result of such an effort, is inexplicable to us without introducing first causes and purposive ends. The second law of thermodynamics – self-care or minding one’s own business.34

It is not difficult to see the prose style of Three Poems in such sentences. Indeed, all the hallmarks of Ashbery’s mature manner are here: the passive voice, the contrasting short and front-weighted, long sentences, the unspecified pronouns. Underlying these stylistic characteristics is the structuring parataxis by which authority itself is brought into question. The effect of Auden’s lists is to amplify the atmosphere of treachery, as seen in the short poems above, by introducing a variety of conflicting speakers, addresses and implied recipients. The result is a profoundly disorienting textual environment. We see this clearly (or, rather, unclearly) at the end of the Airman’s journal: Fourth Day. All menstruation ceases. Vampires are common in the neighbourhood of the Cathedral, epidemics of lupus, halitosis, and superfluous hair. Fifth Day. Pressure of ice, falling fire. The last snarl of families beneath the toppling column. Biting at wounds as the sutures tear. 24th. Four days. What’s the use of counting them now? 25th. Why, the words in my dream under Uncle’s picture, ‘I have crossed it’. To have been told the secret that will save everything and not to have listened; and now less than three days in which to prepare myself. My whole life has been mistaken, progressively more and more complicated, instead of finally simple.35

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The distinction between ‘showing’ and ‘telling’ is taken to an extreme here. Unlike in Whitman’s epic lists, the reader is forced to interpret Auden’s in order to make them and their context meaningful. The absence of the interpretive closure creates a proliferation of meaning (a reading, as we have seen, Ashbery was keen to apply to Eliot as well). Hence, contrary to the usual dénouement of literary works, the Airman’s story at its end is seen to have been ‘progressively more and more complicated, instead of finally simple’. Auden’s parataxis ultimately becomes a performance of this proliferation of significance. In the case of the ‘Journal of an Airman’ this performance has a specific context; the narrative of rushed diary entries amidst the machinations of war finds its urgent, maddened and distracted atmosphere naturally represented in the list. Auden is suggesting that both the communication breakdown consequent on the political crises of the 1930s, and the rise of authoritarianism in response, necessitate a radically different form of address that will create a new dialogue with audiences. Ashbery thinks such a strategy might be a style for all seasons, forming the basis of an aesthetic of inattention able to situate the reader at the poem’s centre. When Willard Speigelman notes that ‘Ashbery never explains, but he always describes or details,’ he is, put into the jargon, making a distinction between hypotaxis and parataxis.36 Many of Ashbery’s poems elide description and detail as well, however. One of the many great poems in Rivers and Mountains, ‘Into the Dusk-Charged Air’, shows how the list can operate as its own end, as a thing-in-itself rather than a set of details descriptive of something larger: The Zambezi chimed. The Oxus Flowed somewhere. The Parnahyba Is flowing, like the wind-washed Cumberland. The Araguía flows in the rain. And, through overlying rocks the Isère Cascades gently. The Guadalquiver sputtered. Someday time will confound the Indre, Making a rill of the Hwang. And The Potomac rumbles softly. Crested birds Watch the Ucayali go Through dreaming night. You cannot stop The Yenisei. (RM, 18–19)

Unlike the disjunctions of The Tennis Court Oath, where Ashbery had attempted to imitate the fragmentation of other forms of Modernism, the parataxis of ‘Into the Dusk-Charged Air’ is the epitome of Ashbery’s ‘putting it all in’ aesthetic. The form of the poem is inclusive to the point of meaninglessness; unlike Auden’s lists, which explore issues of

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selection, censorship and communication breakdown, ‘Into the DuskCharged Air’ is an all-embracing, indiscriminate catalogue of rivers whose importance (unlike Auden’s ‘wires’) is obviously minimal. The poem is more than the sum of its rivers, of course; what the arbitrary list form (one river per line) offers is an account of what it is to write within the constraints of such strictures. Bob Perelman’s important theorisation of parataxis, qualifying some of the grander claims made by other theorists of the ‘New Sentence’, suggests that rather than negating narrative (in its widest sense), paratactical writing rather transforms narrative from the story of something (a life, for example), into a ‘renarrativisation’ of the act of writing.37 In accordance with this, ‘Into the DuskCharged Air’ is the story of a search for adjectives, verbs and adverbs, and the attempt to organise them around their rivers. The lines above, for example, are as notable for breaking the poem’s ‘rules’ as they are for keeping them; the first line contains two rivers, while the penultimate line has none. The poem, that is, flowing nowhere, is a list in so far as it proceeds: ‘You cannot stop’ it. The fullest development of this paratactical flow is The Vermont Notebook (1975), a much-ignored Ashbery book. Again, Ashbery’s inheritance from Auden is most significant in what it elides. Ashbery’s lists here are related to Auden’s mostly in their barefacedness: ‘Suede, tweed, cotton, silk, jersey, whipcord, cavalry twill, melton, moire, nylon, net, challis, cordovan, maxi, midi, scarf, shoes, zipper, cuff, button’ (VN, 27) being a typical example. The lists of The Vermont Notebook, read as a list of lists, as sets within a set, give a sense of process. In the book, as we turn page after page, we feel the lists being composed, whether out of boredom, leisure or both (Vermont suggests a holiday, though Ashbery actually wrote the lists on various buses around New England). In this page-turning, however, lies the difference between Ashbery and Auden. The lists of The Vermont Notebook, unlike Auden’s, are very easy to read. The Vermont Notebook is a radically invitational book, striving towards a rhetoric in which the poet seems absent, but it does not operate at all like The Orators. Rather, easy on the interpretive faculties, and like the day-dreaming effect so prevalent in Ashbery’s two previous volumes, Three Poems and The Double Dream of Spring, The Vermont Notebook is more like raw material for us to ‘Wish away’, in the text’s own words. This is seen in the narrative parataxis of the poem: The trees have their galoshes, the little boxes where the newspaper is delivered . . . Bang on the air went the sparrow. Little Johnny ran in the house. The man in the hall. The red spider against the pane. How dark the furniture is his brain ticked off against the strangeness of invented circumstances. This

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was no way. Tomorrow breathed. There is an island called today you can wish it away it is a blob of tear plopped simply awful on the grass. Wish away. (33)

The passage is in clear contrast to the anarchic urgency of Auden’s Airman. In place of the potentially duplicitous items of Auden’s treacherous records, Ashbery presents a catalogue of abstracted and, for the most part, static items for his own meditation, and in doing so offers up a work made for our interpretation of that meditation. Ashbery says of the book that, ‘at one point I was trying to think of every poet’s name that I could think of. And then just names of people that I had met or had heard about – society figures.’38 As in Perelman’s description of parataxis, what is presented most vividly in Ashbery’s lists is the mind in the act of making them. ‘Most of [The Vermont Notebook] was written on a bus,’ Ashbery recollects later, ‘which I found to be an interesting experience. Writing on a moving vehicle. Not only did my mind move, the landscape was moving as well.’39 If the ‘mind moving’ is expressed in a parataxis of random elements, it is because this is how Ashbery conceives of a human mind in a fast world. Ashbery, that is, reads parataxis as a form imitative of thinking. Ashbery feels that the ‘irrationality and disjointedness’ of Auden’s ‘Paid on Both Sides’ ‘adds to the general sense of futility and unreason’ of its characters; likewise, Ashbery’s Audenesque lists appear to read the paratactical poetry of The Orators as a formal imitation of the disjointed, schizophrenic and confused mental lives of characters living in ‘the modern world’. This is by no means absent from the ‘Journal of an Airman’ or other parts of The Orators; it is the importance Ashbery attaches to this aspect of Auden’s work (and doesn’t attach to other, more directly political aspects) that is key. Geoff Ward has spoken of Ashbery’s reader-consciousness in terms apposite to The Vermont Notebook: ‘not only does he not mind where the poem is headed, but he is quite happy to turn around from the steering wheel in order to chat with us on the back seat . . . [Ashbery’s work has] a kind of generosity that allows the reader a genuinely creative role.’40 Charles Altieri similarly refers to ‘a dialectic of call and response’ in Ashbery – a dialectic that is clearly the motivating force behind Ashbery’s use of the list.41 The reader is invited to the site of thinking in Ashbery’s lists as much as the writer, but it is necessary to look back at Auden’s very different aims, and decide just how desirable and sufficient this is as a major aim of poetry. Auden, as I have discussed, has more on his plate than allowing his reader to contribute to the meaning of a text, though this aspiration is undoubtedly both laudable and present in

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The Orators. Alongside its radically indeterminate surface, The Orators makes palpable the dangers of a free-for-all in political rhetoric; the Fascist, after all, is in a stronger rhetorical position if ‘He means what he says,’ and this is a risk to which Auden’s book is always attentive. Ashbery’s good driving-seat manners, prepared to ‘turn around from the steering wheel to chat with us on the back seat’, on the other hand, as Ward’s metaphor suggests, are potentially dangerous in their excess. Perhaps Ashbery feels he is writing at a time with no possibility of encountering the kind of political disasters that would emerge for Auden in the 1930s. Such optimism is a luxury The Orators cannot afford. * * * It is not my intention to claim that the aesthetics of parataxis exhausts Ashbery’s work, or his sense of poetic authority. Rather, the list is descriptive of Ashbery’s style in so far as it serves as a metaphor for it. The Ashberyan list embodies, in miniature, the major concerns of the poet’s manner, and begins to unravel for us the complex function of style in addressing readers. First and foremost, the list suggests how Ashbery reads Auden’s address as a performance. In Ashbery, parataxis not only discloses meaning, but it also enacts it semantically. In this, parataxis is a symptom of the wider influence of Auden on Ashbery’s syntax. In so far as Ashbery has a prosody, it is Audenesque; the uniqueness of this prosody is that, unlike in other American poets influenced by Auden, such as James Merrill or Richard Howard, it has nothing to do with metrics or other technical questions of versification.42 It is in the development of such a performative prosody, introduced to us in the idea of parataxis, that we see Ashbery’s reading of Audenesque address most fully. The influence of Auden on Ashbery’s poetic syntax goes back to Ashbery’s earliest poems, as ‘The Grapevine’ shows. We can see the basic mechanics of its development in ‘Rivers and Mountains’, the title poem of Ashbery’s 1966 collection. The poem is influenced by Auden in conventional ways, with its visual perspective based on Auden’s panoramic ‘hawk vision’ poems, from ‘Paysage Moralisé’, a poem Ashbery rewrites again and again (not least in ‘These Lacustrine Cities’, the first poem of Rivers and Mountains), to a number of landscape vignettes and sestinas in The Orators.43 However, the poem’s principal interest lies not in its thematic or visual elements, but in the unusual method of their delivery. Probably the exemplary poem for Ashbery here is Auden’s ‘Detective Story’ of 1936. Here are the openings of both pieces:

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For who is ever quite without his landscape, The straggling village street, the house in trees, All near the church, or else the gloomy town house, The one with the Corinthian pillars, or The tiny workmanlike flat: in any case A home, the centre where the three or four things That happen to a man do happen?44 – On the secret map the assassins Cloistered, the Moon River was marked Near the eighteen peaks and the city Of humiliation and defeat – wan ending Of the trail among dry papery leaves Gray-brown quills like thoughts In the melodious but vast mass of today’s Writing through fields and swamps Marked, on the map, with little bunches of weeds. (RM, 10)

Like Auden’s poem, Ashbery’s opens with a long sentence in which the reader is forced to retain in mind the opening clause and build-up of items while awaiting the sentence’s completion. In both poems, the syntax imitates the common subject of secrecy. Both, that is, employ the rhetorical trope of aposiopesis to enact a layer of secrecy below the surface of what is actually uttered, deferring the resolution of the sentence both grammatically and thematically. Accumulations of objects syntactically lead the reader to await an unknown dénouement that will reveal the significance of a currently enigmatic set of landscape elements. The process is all the more mysterious in Ashbery’s opening, because such a dénouement never arrives. The rest of the poem performs in a similar way. In the words of one critic: ‘Ashbery’s rhythmic control over our process of reading engages the essence of his meaning.’45 ‘Rivers and Mountains’, as its continuation of Auden’s atmospherics indicates, retains a symbolic economy that its syntax works in harmony with; unlike The Vermont Notebook, and much more like Auden, the poem is imitative of something beyond itself. In the context of Ashbery’s œuvre, therefore, the poem should be categorised with the early Auden imitations of Some Trees and The Tennis Court Oath. Ashbery’s later poems cannot properly be described as mimetic in form, because they do not so much imitate their subject as become that subject. The Vermont Notebook, as we have seen, is an extreme example of such becoming, and has been ignored by critics primarily because of this, and its anomalous position succeeding Three Poems, Ashbery’s quite different and most enduring experiment with syntax. Much has been written on the influence of Auden’s prose work, ‘Caliban to the

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Audience’ from The Sea and the Mirror, on Three Poems.46 This is an influence that echoes beyond Ashbery’s 1972 work, and into the more radically syntactic poetics of Ashbery’s later career. Ashbery says the collection previous to Three Poems, The Double Dream of Spring, ‘had gotten to a tightness and strictness that bothered me, and I began to feel that I’d have to start moving in some other direction because I had become too narrow’.47 There is nothing strict about the syntax of Three Poems or its 1944 predecessor. Here is a sentence from each: Our unfortunate dramatist, therefore, is placed in the unseemly predicament of having to give all his passion, all his skill, all his time to the task of ‘doing’ life – consciously to give anything less than all would be a gross betrayal of his gift and an unpardonable presumption – as if it lay in his power to solve this dilemma – yet of having at the same time to hope that some unforeseen mishap will intervene to ruin his effect, without, however, obliterating your disappointment, the expectation aroused by him that there was an effect to ruin, that, if the smiling interest never did arrive, it must, through no fault of its own, have got stuck somewhere; that, exhausted, ravenous, delayed by fog, mobbed and mauled by a thousand irrelevancies, it has, nevertheless, not forgotten its promise but is still trying desperately to get a connection.48 – Here it is that our sensuality can save us in extremis: the atmosphere of the day that event took place, the way the trees and buildings looked, what we said to the person who was both the bearer and fellow recipient of that message and what that person replied, words that were not words but sounds out of time, taken out of any external context in which their content would be recognizable – these facts have entered our consciousness once and for all, have spread through us even into our pores like a marvelous antidote to the cup that the next moment had already prepared and which, whether hemlock or nectar, could only have proved fatal because it was the next, bringing with it the unspoken message that motion could be accomplished only in time, that is in a preordained succession of moments which must carry us far from here, far from this impassive but real moment of understanding which may be the only one we shall ever know, even if it is merely the first of an implied infinite series. (TP, 76)

It is not surprising that Ashbery considers Caliban’s speech ‘the most brilliant Auden has ever done’ and ‘the closest to perfection he has ever attained’; the syntax of Auden’s prose is so evident in Ashbery’s verse as well as his prose poetry as to make ‘Caliban to the Audience’ stylistically one of the most important texts of Ashbery’s career. Here, a diffuse rather than a deviant grammar is utilised by Ashbery; following Auden, his sentence is long and labyrinthine, but ultimately adheres to the conventions of the English language. In practical terms, however, both sentences are extremely difficult to read, and much more so to understand.

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The front-weighted, run-on, digressive and revisionary syntax unexpectedly combines a conversational quality with communicative difficulty. This difficulty, however, is limited to the way we conventionally read poems. A large part of what Three Poems explores is the relationship between reading and attention. Readers of Three Poems, if they wish to get through the volume, must adapt reading habits. Rather than pinpointing the ‘sense’ of these sentences, which is possible but laborious, one must attend to their process and the individual, minor conclusions that their syntax prompts one to make along the way. We are reminded here of Ashbery’s earliest interest in Auden: the way in which the older poet shows the traditional ‘division between form and content’ to be false. Ashbery’s answer to this false division is, through a reading of Auden, to make the form the content by making syntax the principal conveyance of significance. Such syntactic content is by no means the whole story of Three Poems; it takes on a significance, however, as the feature of his early career that Ashbery elects to continue and expand. That is to say, out of the experiment of Three Poems, and the other imitations of Auden before it, Ashbery ultimately seeks to make form the only content of his poetry. Flow Chart is the exemplary poem in this regard, and a work, in its scale and ambitions, heralding Ashbery’s final move into a ‘late style’. We have discussed the political motives for such a shift in form–content relations in Chapter 3, where the historical transformation of liberalism in the 1980s was explained as one reason for changes in Ashbery’s conception of flow in his poetry. Published in 1991, Flow Chart was Ashbery’s first long poem since 1984’s ‘A Wave’. In relation to the earlier poem, Flow Chart is produced as Reaganism, whose emergence was an occasion of political crisis in ‘A Wave’, becomes entrenched, prompting a more passive resignation to, if not quite an acceptance of, the apparently complete project of neoliberalism. Running to 216 pages in its US edition, the poem must be taken as a serious statement of intent. The genesis of Flow Chart is in the suggestion of Trevor Winkfield, the New York artist who eventually produced a painting for the cover of the book, that Ashbery write a 100-page poem about his mother, who had recently died. Ashbery then set out to write one page per day between the poem’s commencement (on 8 December 1987) and his sixty-first birthday (28 July 1988). The manuscript of the poem is, indeed, 100 pages long. It is, ‘of course’, Ashbery later notes, ‘not about my mother’, because he doesn’t write about subjects.49 The work has none the less come to seem one of Ashbery’s most ‘confessional’ poems in so far as it is concerned with the self in conventional Romantic terms. Whatever its theme, however, it would be a mistake to read the poem

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itself as Romantic or Confessional, for the simple reason that its subject, in every sense, is expressed as form. Jody Norton, in an excellent essay on Ashbery, notes: Over and over in Ashbery’s poetry, self-knowledge as constituted by a series of reflective glimpses, cinematic in their framed brevity, but lacking any governing directorial intention, gives rise to a sense of subjectivity as structural process, or syntax.50

What distinguishes the form of Flow Chart, that is, is its focus on one subjective matter: what it is to write. In comparison to Auden, the social world of the poem has been reduced to what can be subsumed into an account of writing. ‘[Y]ou found yourself / inside a huge pen / or panopticon,’ Ashbery writes, with a pun on pen that claims writing as all-embracing, occupying the space vacated by Ashbery’s rejection of the Audenesque concern with wider issues of politics. As the book says elsewhere, again opposing the political to the mechanics of writing: ‘My politics shouldn’t matter. It’s my finger / that should – it’s here I’ll take my stand’ (155). Ashbery’s newly private sense of subjectivity in the poem focuses the energies of formal mimesis on to its own production. Rather than rendering discontinuity, or time, or any other term, however vague, used by Ashbery to describe what he calls ‘the experience of experience’, syntax in Flow Chart functions to keep a finger on the pulse of writing. It is a poem embodying what Norton calls ‘subjectivity as structural process’. As the metaphor of the flow chart implies, the poem’s exploration of subjectivity is both formless and formal; its formlessness is its form. Lines from the beginning of Flow Chart are illustrative: I think it was at that moment he knowingly and in my own best interests took back from me the slow-flowing idea of flight, now too firmly channeled, its omnipresent reminders etched too deeply into my forehead, its crass grievances and greetings a class apart from wonders every man feels, whether alone in bed, or with a lover, or beached with the shells on some atoll (and if solitude swallows us up betimes, it is only later that the idea of its permanence sifts in view, yea later and perhaps only occasionally, and only much later stands from dawn to dusk, just as the plaintive sound of the harp of the waves is always there as a backdrop to conversation and conversion, even when most forgotten) and cannot make sense of them, but he knows the familiar, unmistakable thing, and that gives him courage

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as day expires and evening marshals its hosts, in preparation for the long night to come. (FC, 4)

Attention here, far more than in Three Poems, is stretched to breaking point and then beyond, and, given the length of the poem, from here further still. One cannot possibly retain in mind the beginning of the sentence’s main clause for a full eighteen lines of complex syntax. The parentheses are long, and in the manner of Raymond Roussel, contain parentheses of their own. As we think we have arrived at a logical end to the sentence, qualifier after qualifier appears, to extend it yet further. The sentencing is so hard even to follow, let alone make sense of, that a reading of the poem is inevitably forced back on the experience of syntax, which necessarily takes centre-stage. The reader is required, more fully than in Ashbery’s earlier work, to surrender to inattention. As in Three Poems, there is an intentional aimlessness to the sentences of Flow Chart. In Three Poems, however, aimlessness did not mean a lack of rigour; the difficulty of that volume is partly down to its incessant pursuit of thoughts and ideas. Flow Chart, on the other hand, is designed around an absence of ideas, banking on the ability of its syntax somehow to mean. The poem is primarily a matter of tonal flow: And as gravel sinks slowly with the aquifer’s depletion, those not in the know will begin to stir in their sleep; it will gradually dawn on them (in dreams of ‘cheese, toasted mostly’) how the ingenious theory was flawed; indeed it was flaws that produced the dazzling quicksilver sheen that attracted so many to it for so long. If that’s the case, why tarry on rutted goat-paths from whence even the nearest foothills are shrouded, by mists, from view? The animals are incredible; there’s even a dog named Bruce. One can retool the context, but slowly, slowly, and of course there is no positive guarantee of a successful outcome; one should think of it as a virtuoso spinning-song whose relentless roulades promise minor disturbances among the cobwebbed rafters but perhaps nothing much to weave one-armed nightshirts with for the wild swans, your brothers: only try to forget the slow upward path to perfectness and let its mirror-image come to install its truly sensitive surface within you, during the night of deft dreams and bad brushes with dolor. Fear of the dark causes it, but by then to have been around and been of it will have carried over into lunch.

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Do you think there’s some connection between this and that which happened before? Perhaps not. Perhaps there is none, but the Patagonians will like it, all 499,500 of ’em. (33)

What purpose do items like the ‘aquifer’s depletion’, the ‘cheese, toasted mostly’, ‘rutted goat-paths’, ‘a dog named Bruce’, lunch, the Patagonians (‘all 499,500 of ’em’) serve in these lines? One would be hard-pushed to discover any kind of semantic meaning in this grouping – on the whole, Flow Chart’s images are either arbitrary, or conscious clichés. Meaning is enacted, rather, through the tonal shifts these images institute. The movement here seems to be as follows. The first two lines’ assonance and alliteration make a slow, low sound (‘slowly . . . those . . . know’; ‘sinks slowly . . . stir in their sleep’) conducive to a sense of the ominous. This is quickly dissipated, however, by the more stuttering syntax of the next two-and-a-half lines, which are subsequently more explanatory, as well as more detached, given their clichés and quotation marks. The question then represents a rhetorical turn, bringing in the previously detached author, who suddenly realises his involvement (‘If that’s the case’). Thence comes a move from the conditional to the declarative present tense, with concrete details assuaging any possible fear or mystery present in the beginning of this first sentence (‘a dog named Bruce’ bringing a particular sense of the innocuous). The next sentence begins by returning to a sense of urgency, refuting the previous trivial details, with, again, a slowness (‘slowly, / slowly’). The syntax then becomes difficult once more, but this time because of the sentence’s interminability, its qualifiers and extensions, which bring a sense of desperation, engaging the writer more than he initially wished to let on. ‘Fear of the dark causes it’ begins to offer a resolution and explanation of what’s been going on, but does so only tonally, as ‘it’ is unspecified (the sentence only sounds like a conclusion). After this mood of conclusiveness, the penultimate sentence offers a question, of all things, and a vague one at that, whose answers are only tentative: ‘Perhaps not’. This inconclusiveness is then assuaged, with a shade of stoical irony, by the bizarre enumeration of Patagonians – a comfort whose particular source the reader is not privy to, but none the less senses in the tone. Ashbery said four years before he wrote Flow Chart that ‘on the whole I feel that poetry is going on all the time inside, an underground stream. One can let down one’s bucket and bring the poem back up.’51 Another analogy Ashbery makes in an interview conducted while he was writing the poem, this time with television, points towards Raymond Williams’s ideas of flow in that medium:

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I think I can plug into poetry whenever I want to, and it will come out much the same way at any given time. I don’t do it that often. It’s like that television set over there. I don’t watch television much, but occasionally I turn it on and, sure enough, something is going on, and that’s that for that moment.52

It is not the details themselves that are of interest in this ‘underground stream’, then, but simply that the stream is flowing. Autobiography is no doubt present in the details, if one has the time to disembowel the poem, but, as Ashbery would claim, it is merely exemplary material, a token of what he happens to have in his mind. As he said on the poem’s publication, Flow Chart is written ‘during the course of thinking about my past’, not about that past itself.53 What seems like difficulty of syntax in Flow Chart is, ultimately, a liberation from such concerns as understanding. Like the writer, the reader is invited to go with flow. Inattention is relaxed in Ashbery’s later work. Put in the terms of the poem: ‘Excuse me while I fart. There, that’s better. I actually feel relieved’ (201). In Flow Chart, writing is privileged over reading; abstract process, that is, is prioritised over the dynamics of communication. In this, Ashbery attempts to describe the present directly, rather than constructing a history of it through the trope of reading. Though Flow Chart is Ashbery’s most direct engagement with an academic establishment increasingly mediating between him and his reading public, it has, in this directness, jettisoned the metaphoric role that reading itself had provided Ashbery with for exploring readerly relationships. The sense of a ‘history of the present’ is dulled by a strategy that, however self-consciously, withdraws into itself, penned in by its own pen. In essence, Ashbery is reading himself in his later career: the poetry that I mostly read now is by contemporary, mostly young poets, a lot of them influenced by me I have to admit, which is not the reason that I read them; the reason that I read them is that they seem in many cases to be trying to shake off this influence, stumbling on something new which I want to follow myself.54

The poetry of Flow Chart, consequently, is more a question of overhearing oneself than of addressing another. The Audenesque concerns with readerly addressing have been turned on their head in Ashbery’s later work.55 Open forms of address in which reticence was, paradoxically, the decisive factor in engaging the reader, give way to a poetry attempting to represent directly, as identical, the processes of reading and writing. The potential problem is that, rather than the meeting of poem and reader staged in Ashbery’s earlier work, the later strategy may create a parallelism rather than an intersection, with lines that, to borrow Andrew Marvell’s metaphor, can never meet.

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This is not the place to decide whether Flow Chart represents the decadent form or the logical conclusion of Ashbery’s reading of Auden. What is hopefully clear is the importance of Auden for Ashbery throughout his career, and that Ashbery’s most important poetic achievement, his manner, begins and ends with this reading. Put simply, it is Auden that allows us to position Ashbery, and, by such positioning, to specify the originality of his poetics. Auden, though, is ‘the first and most important influence’ on Ashbery – the most important, that is, but not the only. The sense in which Auden is typical of Ashbery’s reading, as the figure that all Ashbery’s subsequent engagements are modelled on, should be clear. It is, above all, Ashbery’s manner that represents a new phase in a poetic tradition placing readers at the centre of its operations. Ashbery’s later work is, in this sense, the exception that proves the rule. The rule, that Ashbery is the Western literary tradition’s first poet of reading, is, according to this book, of significant utility in describing the poet’s exceptional originality.

Notes 1. Peter Stitt ‘The Art of Poetry’, p. 38. 2. David Herd, ‘John Ashbery “In Conversation” ’, pp. 32–3. 3. ‘Once,’ notes Ashbery, ‘when I pointed out to him that he sort of ignored Auden’s effect on me, Harold told me, “Nonsense, darling. You only think you were influenced by Auden. But it’s Stevens who made you who you are” ’ (cited in Aidan Wasley, ‘The Gay Apprentice: Ashbery, Auden, and the Portrait of the Artist as a Young Critic’, p. 668). 4. Aidan Wasley, ‘The Gay Apprentice’; and Geoff Ward, Statutes of Liberty: The New York School of Poets, pp. 94–113. The issue has mainly been the victim of, on the one hand, critics wishing simultaneously to erase Auden from the American literary history and set up Stevens as the twentieth century’s greatest poet; and on the other, of avant-gardists for whom Auden is at best an awkward and at worst a reactionary cultural figure. 5. Wasley, ‘The Gay Apprentice’, p. 668. 6. Herd, ‘John Ashbery “In Conversation” ’, pp. 32–3. 7. Stitt, ‘The Art of Poetry’, p. 38. 8. W. H. Auden, The English Auden, p. 24. 9. The Harvard thesis is at the Houghton Library, Harvard University (AM-6, box 31). 10. Auden, The English Auden, p. 25. 11. Edward Mendelson, The Early Auden, p. 10. 12. Auden, The English Auden, p. 25. 13. The idea has been explored most notably in John Shoptaw’s book, On the Outside Looking Out. The most systematic articulation of its significance for the gay poet is in an essay that discusses precisely Auden’s relationship with Ashbery, Aidan Wasley’s ‘The Gay Apprentice’. Wasley suggests Ashbery’s reticence is ‘the difficulty of the wounded, and therefore

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guarded, lover whose desire for the beloved manifests itself in a reticence that is also a challenge’ (p. 671). For other discussions of Ashbery’s supposed homoerotic poetic, see: Harold Beaver, ‘The Dandy at Play’; David Bergman, ‘Choosing Our Fathers: Gender and Identity in Whitman, Ashbery, and Richard Howard’; Lee Edelman, ‘The Pose of Imposture: Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” ’; Thomas E. Yingling, Hart Crane and the Homosexual Text; Catherine Imbiglio, ‘ “Our days put on such reticence”: The Rhetoric of the Closet in John Ashbery’s Some Trees’. 14. Interview with John Tranter. See johntranter.com/interviewer/ashb85. shtml. 15. Stitt, ‘The Art of Poetry’, p. 36. 16. Ashbery often equates this concept specifically with Englishness: Tact, courtesy, good taste, honesty, craftsmanship – these are some of the qualities traditionally associated with the British. Americans swoon over English good manners, not noticing that they can be an effective coverup for rudeness. The French grudgingly admire ‘le fair-play anglais.’ And there you have the problem of English art in general. (‘Puttin’ on the Brits’, review of British Art Now at the Guggenheim, New York, p. 50) 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

Ward, Statutes of Liberty: The New York School of Poets, p. 89. Cited in Herd, John Ashbery and American Poetry, p. 168. Geoffrey Grigson, ‘Auden as a Monster’, p. 13. Auden, The English Auden, p. 35. Ibid., p. 36. For the most coherent accounts of this, see: Angus Fletcher, A New Theory for American Poetry; Herd, John Ashbery and American Poetry; and Shoptaw, On the Outside Looking Out. All passim. Ashbery himself, in his thesis on Auden, describes ‘didactic poetry’ as ‘inconceivable’. Auden, Secondary Worlds, pp. 130–1. The Orators is probably the first because Ashbery remembers having taken it out from a library before he bought Auden’s Collected in 1945, where he read most of Auden’s work, including The Sea and the Mirror (unpublished interview with author, May 2008). See Wasley, ‘The Gay Apprentice’, p. 681. Auden, The English Auden, p. 62. Ibid., p. 61. For a historical discussion of this breakdown, see David Trotter, The Making of the Reader. Auden, The English Auden, p. 61. Richard Hoggart, Auden: An Introductory Essay, pp. 37–8. Auden, The English Auden, pp. 78, 81. Ibid., p. 78. For each of these lists see, respectively: Auden, The English Auden, pp. 66–8, 69–71, 79–81, 81–2, 94, 84, 96–8. Ibid., p. 73. Ibid., p. 93.

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36. Willard Speigelman, How Poets See the World: The Art of Description in Contemporary Poetry, p. 24. 37. Bob Perelman, ‘Parataxis and Narrative: The New Sentence in Theory and Practice’, p. 317. 38. Unpublished interview with the author, May 2008. 39. Sue Gangel, ‘John Ashbery’, p. 15. 40. Ward, Statutes of Liberty: The New York School of Poets, p. 100. 41. Altieri, The Art of Twentieth Century American Poetry, p. 210. 42. Richard Howard and J. D. McClatchy speak of ‘detaching’ from Auden his ‘poetical practice’ and the ‘technical’ – ‘the occasional stanza scheme, a model for handling syllabics, that sort of thing’ (The W. H. Auden Society Newsletter, 19: After Auden, http://www.audensociety.org/19newsletter. html). James Merrill calls Auden the ‘father of forms’, and the ‘WHA’ figure in his The Changing Light at Sandover (1976 to 1982) gives guidance on the right metre for heavenly voices, speculating on the significance of the nine-line stanza. Auden’s role in formalism is not significantly different from the lessons in craft Middle Generation poets took from Eliot and the writers he had recommended. 43. Auden’s term refers to Thomas Hardy. See Auden, ‘A Literary Transference’, p. 83. 44. Auden, The English Auden, p. 204. 45. Charles O. Hartman, Free Verse, p. 166. 46. For the best account of this, see Herd, John Ashbery and American Poetry, pp. 131–4. 47. A. Poulin Junior, ‘The Experience of Experience: A Conversation with John Ashbery’, p. 254. 48. Auden, Collected Poems, pp. 442–3. 49. Cited in Shoptaw, p. 302. 50. Jody Norton, ‘ “Whispers Out of Time”: The Syntax of Being in the Poetry of John Ashbery’, p. 282. 51. Stitt, ‘The Art of Poetry’, p. 51. 52. Gangel, ‘John Ashbery’, p. 19. For Raymond Williams’s discussion of televisual flow, see his Television: Technology and Cultural Form, pp. 77–120. 53. Dinitia Smith, ‘Poem Alone’, p. 48. 54. Unpublished interview with the author, May 2008. 55. There have been a number of illuminating accounts of the importance of the late Ashbery. For the most persuasive account of these, see Stephen Burt, ‘John Ashbery, a Poet for our Times’, pp. 55–63.

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Index

‘A Boy’, 133 ‘A Driftwood Altar’, 102 ‘A Sermon’, 29 ‘A Wave’, 83–97, 100–1, 103 Adorno, Theodor, 9–10, 38, 59, 76 Allen, Donald, 107 Althusser, Louis, 9 Altieri, Charles, 59–61, 150 ‘And the Stars Were Shining’, 101–2 ‘April Galleons’, 98–9 April Galleons, 98–101 Aquinas, Thomas, 51 ‘As One Put Drunk into the PacketBoat’, 44 Auden, W. H., 3, 26, 132–61 passim ‘Detective Story’, 151–2 ‘Petition’, 142–3 Preface to Some Trees, 29 ‘The Letter’, 136–8 The Orators, 140, 145–8, 160 ‘The Questioner Who Sits So Sly’, 141–2 The Sea and the Mirror, 73, 140, 153–4 ‘The Secret Agent’, 135–6 Austin, J. L., 12, 15 Barrell, John, 61, 65 Barthes, Roland, 7, 9 Baudelaire, Charles, 89 Baxandall, Michael, 25 ‘Becalmed on Strange Waters’, 99

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Beddoes, Thomas Lovell, 3, 55 Berkson, Bill, 28 Bernstein, Charles, 98 Berryman, John, 28, 56, 106 Bloom, Harold, 1, 4, 6, 9, 14, 47, 84, 132, 159 Bonnard, Pierre, 9 Bowen, Elizabeth, 8 Breslin, Paul, 103 Brooks, Cleanth, 27, 30, 38 Brown, Merle, 122 Browne, Thomas, 94 Burke, Edmund, 57, 67 Butts, Mary, 2 Cage, John, 107 Carey, John, 37 Carter, Jimmy, 83 Charles Eliot Norton Lectures (Ashbery), 11, 20–1, 54, 116–17 Clare, John, 3, 14, 18–19, 22, 40 ‘Emmonsails Heath in Winter’, 68 ‘Hares at Play’, 69–70 ‘Mouse Nest’, 61 ‘The Nightingales Nest’, 64 ‘Clepsydra’, 35–40 Cohen, Keith, 94 Coleridge, S. T., 59–60, 63, 86 Collected Poems, 22, 27 Costello, Bonnie, 85–6, 104

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Index Cowley, Abraham, 28 Crozier, Andrew, 129 ‘Daffy Duck in Hollywood’, 123 Davie, Donald, 114 Day Lewis, Cecil, 125 Dayan, Joan, 90 de Chirico, Giorgio, 64, 73 ‘Definition of Blue’, 145 Defoe, Daniel, 118 Derrida, Jacques, 39 Dewey, John, 16, 21, 127 Donne, John, 22, 27–50 passim, 51 ‘A Fever’, 36 ‘A Valediction Forbidding Mourning’, 29 ‘A Valediction: Of My Name, In Of My Name, In The Window’, 47 ‘The Paradox’, 31 ‘Witchcraft By a Picture’, 41 DuBois, Andrew, 25–6 Duncan, Robert, 132 ‘Eclogue’, 133 Edelman, Lee, 42 Eliot, T. S., 5, 8, 9, 13, 22, 26, 27, 30, 55, 60–1, 106–29 passim, 161 Four Quartets, 128 The Waste Land, 106–11 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 2, 4, 18, 60–1 Empson, William, 30 ‘Europe’, 109–13 ‘Evening in the Country’, 71–2 ‘Fantasia on The Nut-Brown Maid’, 83 Fenton, James, 54 Finkelstein, Norman, 94 Fish, Stanley, 7–8 Flaubert, Gustave, 67–8 Fletcher, Angus, 104 Flow Chart, 101, 154–9

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‘For John Clare’, 18–19, 55–8 Foucault, Michel, 14 Freilicher, Jane, 9 Frye, Northrop, 126 Gardner, Helen, 30 Genette, Gerard, 69–70 Ginsberg, Allen, 3, 27, 61 Graves, Robert, 125 Grigson, Geoffrey, 140, 146 Harte, Bret, 1 Hartman, Charles, 46 Harvard Advocate, 27 ‘Haunted Landscape’, 77–9 Heaney, Seamus, 54, 68 Hejinian, Lyn, 98 Herd, David, 16, 126 Hill, Geoffrey, 13 Hobbes, Thomas, 51 Hoggart, Richard, 146 Howard, Richard, 151, 161 Hume, David, 10, 118, 123 ‘Into the Dusk-Charged Air’, 148–9 Ives, Charles, 2 James, Henry, 23, 112 James, William, 16–17 Jameson, Fredric, 15, 120, 127 Johnson, Samuel, 29 Joyce, James, 18 Kant, Immanuel, 9, 39, 63–4, 67 Keats, John, 67, 118, 121 Khrushchev, Nikita, 58 Kinzie, Mary, 80 Koch, Kenneth, 8, 17, 130, 133 Kristeva, Julia, 6 Lawrence, D. H., 9 Leavis, F. R., 9, 117, 128 Lehman, David, 127 LeQueux, William, 110–13

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Lessing, G. E., 66–7 Levenson, Michael, 114 Levertov, Denise, 82 Lewis, Jerry Lee, 118 ‘Litany’, 40, 83 Locus Solus, 8, 31 Longenbach, James, 106–7 ‘Loving Mad Tom’, 128 Lowell, Robert, 13, 27, 38, 56, 60, 82, 86, 106, 114, 132

Pasternak, Boris, 18 Pater, Walter, 10–11, 14 Paulin, Tom, 54–6 Perelman, Bob, 149 Perloff, Marjorie, 2–4, 17, 90 Pollock, Jackson, 15, 116 Pound, Ezra, 8, 9, 13, 61, 107, 124, 125, 126, 129, 131 Prince, F. T., 3, 8 ‘Pyrography’, 82

MacFarquhar, Larissa, 21, 75 Marvell, Andrew, 3, 18, 22, 27–50 passim, 51, 118, 158 ‘Dialogue Between the Soul and Body’, 31–2 ‘The Definition of Love’, 29, 48–9, 120 ‘The Picture of Little T. C. In a Prospect of Flowers’, 32–4 ‘Tom May’s Death’, 44 McClatchy, J. D., 161 Marx, Karl, 144 Mendelson, Edward, 136 Merrill, James, 132, 151, 161 Meyerbeer, Giacomo, 118 Middleton, Christopher, 89 Miller, Stephen Paul, 16, 41, 84 ‘Mixed Feelings’, 19 Moore, Marianne, 126 Moore, Nicholas, 3, 9 Murphy, Margueritte, 75 Murry, John Middleton, 62

Quinney, Laura, 99–100 Quintilian, 56

Norton, Jody, 155 O’Hara, Frank, 8, 17–18, 29, 66, 109, 115–17, 124, 126, 132 Olson, Charles, 3, 13, 72, 117 Oppen, George, 122 Ovid, 125 ‘Paradoxes and Oxymorons’, 48–50 Parmagianino, 12, 40–6 Pascal, Blaise, 73

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Reagan, Ronald, 83–4, 89, 97, 98, 103, 154 Reported Sightings, 71 Rich, Adrienne, 56 Richards, I. A., 28, 39, 43 Ricœur, Paul, 43 Riding, Laura, 55, 116, 125 Rimbaud, Arthur, 5, 118, 121, 123 ‘Rivers and Mountains’, 151–2 Rivers, Larry, 24–5 Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 72 Robespierre, Maximilien, 91–2 Rosenberg, Harold, 15 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 86 Roussel, Raymond, 156 Schubert, David, 55, 116 Schultz, Susan, 2 Schuyler, James, 16, 18, 126 Selected Later Poems, 22, 98, 102 Selected Poems, 4, 54, 96, 98 ‘Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror’, 11–13, 40–6, 118 Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, 82 Shelley, P. B., 9, 121 Shetley, Vernon, 39, 107 Silliman, Ron, 98 Silverberg, Mark, 8 Sitwell, Edith, 3, 8, 9 Skinner, Quentin, 13–15, 19, 118 Smith, Grover, 109

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Index Snodgrass, W. D., 28, 114 ‘Some Trees’, 136–8 Some Trees, 133–8 Sontag, Susan, 9, 41, 52, 107 ‘Soonest Mended’, 140 Speilgelman, Willard, 148 Stafford, William, 65 Stein, Gertrude, 5, 71, 73 Stevens, Wallace, 4, 18, 23–4, 66, 72–3, 85, 121, 132, 159 Stick, Jeremy, 71 Taylor, John, 61 ‘Tenth Symphony’, 1 ‘The Double Dream of Spring’, 64–5 ‘The Grapevine’, 135–6 ‘The Invisible Avant-Garde’, 115–16 ‘The Picture of Little J.A. In a Prospect of Flowers’, 17–18, 32–4 ‘The Preludes’, 66 ‘The Recent Past’, 143–4 ‘The Skaters’, 45, 90, 118–27 The Tennis Court Oath, 22, 35, 102, 119, 143 The Vermont Notebook, 149–51 ‘The Way They Took’, 133 Three Hundred Things a Bright Boy Can Do, 121 Three Poems, 73–7, 90, 124, 147, 152–4

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Thomson, James, 61–2, 66 Traherne, Thomas, 2, 73 Turner, J. W. M., 118 Tuve, Rosemond, 30 ‘Undergraduate Stanzas’, 29 Valéry, Paul, 67–8, 72 Vaughan, Henry, 3, 27, 42 Vendler, Helen, 2–4, 70, 103 Verlaine, Paul, 89 Vincent, John Emil, 53, 105 von Hallberg, Robert, 85–6, 104 Ward, Geoff, 139, 150 Watkin, William, 42–3 Webb, Mary, 9 Weston, Jessie, 110 ‘Wet Casements’, 46–8 Wheelwright, John, 11, 55 Whitman, Walt, 2, 4, 39, 55, 61, 148 Williams, Raymond, 104, 157–8 Williams, William Carlos, 106, 129 Winkfield, Trevor, 154 Wordsworth, William, 22, 59–60, 63, 66, 102, 121 Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 86 The Prelude, 60, 74, 84–97 passim, 103 ‘Years of Indiscretion’, 65–6 Yeats, W. B., 121, 126

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