John Ashbery is America's greatest living poet. He is also greatly
misunderstood. For many he is the inheritor of and American
tradition that includes Walt Whitman and Wallace Stevens. Yet for
some he threatens the very future of poetry. He is a source of
continuing inspiration for younger writers of all kinds. Yet he can
still prompt startling hostility from reviewers. Lauded by
admirers, baffling to detractors, Ashbery's achievement remains
perplexingly great. "John Ashbery and American Poetry" takes this
paradoxical state of affairs as its starting point. David Herd sets
out to provide readers with a new critical language through which
they can appreciate the beauty and complexity of Ashbery's writing.
Presenting the poet in all his forms -avant-garde, nostalgic,
sublime and camp - the book argues that the perpetual inventiveness
of Ashbery's work has always been underpinned by the poets desire
to write the poem fit to cope with its occasion. Tracing Ashbery's
development in the light of this idea, and from its origins in the
dazzling artistic environment of 1950's New York, the book
evaluates his poetry against the aesthetic, literary and historical
backgrounds that have informed it. Ashbery is identified as both an
American pragmatist writing in the sprit of William James, and as
committed literary internationalist learning from Boris Pasternak
and the Russian avant-garde. His poetry is shown to be alive to
such culturally defining issues as the growth of mass culture, the
absence of a divine presence, the war in Vietnam, the emergence of
AIDS, the erosion of tradition, and the decline of the avant-garde.
His responses to such pressures are contrasted with the work of,
among others, Robert Lowell, John Berryman Kenneth Koch, and Frank
O'Hara. The story of a brilliant career, and a history of the
period in which that career has taken shape, "John Ashbery and
American Poetry" provides a compelling account of Ashbery's
importance to Twentieth Century Literature.
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