John Ashbery and British Postmodernism

Abstract

The complexity of postmodernism as a term has been compounded by its overuse. Critics and reviewers of contemporary British poetry have tended to employ it merely to gesticulate towards a number of various, and sometimes contradictory developments. The editor of Bete Noire, John Osborne, has been an exception to this but, as I indicate in my chapter on Craig Raine, even Osborne’s use of the term is unconstructively broad in some respects¹. Much more conspicuously, Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion suggested that the poets in their Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry “do represent a departure, one which may be said to exhibit something of the spirit of post-modernism”². Some of the work of James Fenton and Paul Muldoon may be accurately referred to in this way but it is at best unhelpful and at worst simply wrong to apply it to the others — especially to the most copiously represented poets, Seamus Heaney, Tony Harrison and Douglas Dunn.