Abstract
Using original archival evidence, Karin Roffman argues that Marianne Moore has had a more profound and lasting impact on the poetry of John Ashbery than Wallace Stevens or W.H. Auden, poets more frequently associated with influencing Ashbery’s work. The essay demonstrates the ways Ashbery’s poem “Some Trees” emerged from his intensive study of Moore’s poetry during college, an engagement with her ideas about poetry that he renewed repeatedly over many years. In his important reviews in the 1960s of Moore’s Tell Me Tell Me and Complete Poems, he reread her entire oeuvre, discovering in it deep wells of feeling and a vocabulary for describing his own developing poetic ideas. In his most recent poems, Ashbery continues to quote Moore, placing her ideas and phrases beside and among his own, a fascinating process of thinking and writing that explains as much about his reading of her work as it does about his own.
Works Cited
Ashbery Papers. Houghton Library, Harvard University.
Ashbery Private Collection. Hudson, NY and NYC.
Ashbery, John. 2015. Breezeway. New York: Ecco.
_____. 1986. Selected Poems. New York: Penguin.
_____. 2005. Selected Prose. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
_____. 2008–2015. Interviews with Karin Roffman. 29 Feb 2008, 31 Dec 2011, 12 Sep 2012, Hudson, NY; 9 March 2015 and 12 Sep 2015, NYC.
Hunter, Bob. 2011–2013. Interviews with Karin Roffman. 9 and 10 Aug 2011 and 18 Sep 2013, Thetford Hill, VT.
Kalstone, David. 1985. “Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror.” In Modern Critical Views: John Ashbery, ed. Harold Bloom, 91–114. Philadelphia: Chelsea House.
Leavell, Linda. 2013. Holding On Upside Down: The Life and Work of Marianne Moore. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux.
_____. 2014. “Marianne Moore: Poet & Performer.” 24 Nov Lecture. Woodberry Poetry Room, Harvard University.
Lehman, David (ed.). 1980. Beyond Amazement: New Essays on John Ashbery. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Moore, Marianne. 1981. Complete Poems [CP]. New York: Macmillan.
_____. 1986. The Complete Prose of Marianne Moore, ed. Patricia C. Willis. New York: Viking Penguin.
Shoptaw, John. 1994. On the Outside Looking Out: John Ashbery’s Poetry. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Stevens, Wallace. 1948. “About One of Marianne Moore’s Poems.” The Quarterly Review of Literature 4 (2) (Fall): 143–147. Rpt. The Necessary Angel (1951).
Untermeyer, Louis. 1942. Modern American Poetry, Modern British Poetry: A Critical Anthology. New York: Harcourt, Brace.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Roffman, K. (2018). “Mysteries Expound Mysteries”: Marianne Moore’s Influence on John Ashbery. In: Gregory, E., Hubbard, S. (eds) Twenty-First Century Marianne Moore. Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65109-5_11
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65109-5_11
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-65108-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-65109-5
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)