Abstract
British puzzlement over John Ashbery may have become more respectful since Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror won its clutch of awards, but it remains essentially unchanged. Reviewing Ashbery’s tenth collection, A Wave, Gavin Ewart had this to say in a poetry round-up that included approving notices of Charles Causley and Craig Raine:
John Ashbery’s verse is like a a Moebius strip; it goes on and on and you can’t get into it. A ‘dish of milk is set out at night’ in the very first poem (‘At North Farm’). Is this for a cat, a fox, a hedge-hog, a wandering spirit? No answer.1
The monkish and the frivolous alike were to be trapped in death’s capacious claw But listen while I tell you about the wallpaper —
(John Ashbery, ‘The Ecclesiast’)
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Notes
Craig Raine, ‘The Sylko Bandit’, Rich (London: The Poetry Book Society, 1983) p. 88.
Algernon Charles Swinburne, Under the Microscope (London: D. White, 1872) p. 49
Harold Bloom, ‘The Charity of the Hard Moments’. In Bloom (ed.), Modern Critical Views: John Ashbery (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1985) p. 58.
Philip Larkin, Collected Poems (London/Boston: The Marvell Press/Faber and Faber, 1988) p. 165.
Allen Ginsberg, Collected Poems 1947–1980 (Harmondsworth/New York: Viking, 1984) p. 128.
The quotations are from Stephen Fredman, Poet’s Prose: The Crisis in American Verse (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1983) p. 6;
and Andrew Ross, The Failure of Modernism: Symptoms of American Poetry (New York: Columbia U. P., 1986) p. 160.
Göran Printz-Pahlson, ‘Surface and Accident: John Ashbery’, PN Review, 46, 1985, p. 36.
Andrew Crozier and Tim Longville (eds) A Various Art (Manchester: Carcanet, 1987).
As given by Edward Mendelson, Early Auden (London/Boston: Faber and Faber, 1981) p. 96.
Edward Mendelson, ed., The English Auden: Poems, Essays and Dramatic Writings 1927–1939 (London: Faber and Faber, 1977) p. 46.
As given by Marjorie Perloff, The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage (New Jersey: Princeton U. P., 1981) p. 249.
Lawrence Norfolk, ‘Forever coming closer’, Times Literary Supplement, 17–23 June 1988, p. 681.
Ron Padgett, Toujours l’amour (New York: Sun, 1976) p. 78.
Veronica Forrest-Thomson, Poetic Artifice: A theory of twentieth-century poetry (Manchester: Manchester U. P., 1978) p. 156.
Veronica Forrest-Thomson, Language-Games (Leeds: School of English Press, University of Leeds/New Poets Award 2, 1971) p. 6.
Veronica Forrest-Thomson, On the Periphery (Cambridge: Street Editions, 1976) p. iii.
David Shapiro, John Ashbery: An Introduction to the Poetry (New York: Columbia U. P., 1979) p. 54.
Imre Salusinszky, Criticism in Society: Interviews with Jacques Derrida, Northrop Frye, Harold Bloom, Geoffrey Hartman, Frank Kermode, Edward Said, Barbara Johnson, Frank Lentricchia, and J. Hillis Miller (New York and London: Methuen, 1987) p. 61.
Paul de Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia U. P., 1984) p. vii.
Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (London/Oxford/ New York: Oxford U. P., 1973) p. 11 ff.
Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory (Manchester: Manchester U. P., 1986) p. 6.
Seamus Heaney, The Makings of a Music: Reflections on the Poetry of Wordsworth and Yeats (Liverpool: Liverpool U. P. [Kenneth Allott Lectures I], 1978).
Cyril Connolly, Enemies of Promise (1938) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978) p. 59.
R. K. R. Thornton (ed.), Poetry of the ‘Nineties (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970) pp. 25–6.
Joseph Conrad and F. M. Hueffer, The Nature of a Crime (London: Duckworth, 1924) p. 8.
Ford Madox Ford, Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance (London: Duckworth, 1924) p. 141.
Conrad to Garnett, 31 March 1899. As given by Zdzislaw Najder, Joseph Conrad: A Chronicle (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1983) p. 259.
‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’. Edward Mendelson (ed.), W. H. Auden: Collected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1976) p. 197.
Harold Bloom, Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism (Oxford: Oxford U. P., 1982) p. 270 ff.
Lawrence Norfolk, ‘Forever coming closer’, Times Literary Supplement, 17–23 June 1988. p. 681: Helen Vendler, ‘Understanding Ashbery’, in Bloom (ed.), Modern Critical Views: John Ashbery, p. 188.
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© 1993 Geoff Ward
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Ward, G. (1993). Ashbery and Influence. In: Statutes of Liberty. Language, Discourse, Society. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22498-2_4
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