John Ashbery and English Poetry

Description: A study of how we should read one of America's most important poetsBen Hickman argues that we must attend to Ashbery's radical conception of reading if we are to understand the originality of his writing. His study focuses on Ashbery's reading of English poets, including Andrew Marvell, John Donne, William Wordsworth, John Clare, T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden, and examines Ashbery's writing in terms of an 'aesthetic of inattention'. Hickman critiques the Americanisation of Ashbery's work as well as common assumptions about his Romanticism, his avant-garde Modernism and his engagement with the historical present. He demonstrates that Ashbery's generosity as a writer is closely tied to his generosity, inattention and situatedness as a reader.

Brief description: Ben Hickman is the author of John Ashbery and English Poetry (Edinburgh, 2012) and has published numerous essays on the New York School, the New American Poetry, John Clare and others. He studied at University College, London and currently teaches at the University of Kent.

Review Quotes:

This is an exhaustively researched, persuasive study of lines of influence often given short shrift in the vast, canonical scholarship on Ashbery. Hickman demonstrates clearly the limitations of major US critics (Bloom, Perloff, Vendler) who stress the Pound-Williams-Stevens lineage. By eschewing the anxieties of influence, Hickman instead portrays Ashbery as a poet reading and using other poets, specifically, the metaphysical poets John Clare, Wordsworth, T. S. Eliot, and W. H. Auden. Hickman demonstrates the ways in which Ashbery's evasive, elliptical methods develop from these particularly English models... [T]he demonstration of Clare's non-narrative description as something that allows Ashbery to focus on "the history of the present" is excellent, as is his discussion of Auden's parataxis as the fundamental model for so much of Ashbery's own syntactic juxtaposition and image structuring. Perhaps most incisive is Hickman's observation that though both Eliot and Ashbery employ fragmentary poetics, they do so for vastly different purposes: Eliot to serve his external master narrative and Ashbery to allow fragmentation to become the only narrative of merit. Summing Up: Highly recommended.