John Ashbery Other Traditions.
Harvard University Press,
160 pages, $22.95

In his recent paean to the New York School poets, The Last Avant-Garde (1998), David Lehman describes the composition of John Ashbery’s Charles Eliot Norton Lecture on Raymond Roussel. On the morning of the talk, Ashbery phoned the poet James Tate to say that he couldn’t swing by to pick up Tate in Amherst on the way to Harvard in part because, as Lehman writes, Ashbery “hadn’t yet written the lecture.” “Fortunately,” Lehman purrs, “this lazy man is quick: The lecture on Roussel—one of the highlights of Ashbery’s Norton series—was written that day in the back seat of the car motoring from Manhattan to Cambridge.”

This encomium to Ashbery’s facility seems to have eluded the publicists at Harvard University Press, for nowhere can it be found in the promotional materials for this book, which collects all six of Ash- bery’s 1989–90 Norton Lectures treating poets from “other traditions”: John Clare, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Raymond Roussel, John Wheelwright, Laura Riding, and David Schubert. (Perhaps to set the record straight, Ashbery, in his preface, admits only to putting on some “finishing touches … in the back seat,” though the friend who drove him is thanked.)

Beginning as I have with a biographical anecdote jibes with Ashbery’s own method: each lecture provides a tidy account of those details from the lives that most bear on the work. Taken whole, his poets constitute a haunted bunch: madness (Clare, Schubert), suicide (Beddoes, Roussel), possible attempted suicide (Riding), accidental early death (Wheelwright). Ashbery, though, is less interested in these poets’ hardships than in their obscurity, that is, in their status as minor or little-known poets as well as in their stylistic tendencies toward difficulty and opacity.

“Criticism is doubled edged,” noted Longfellow. “It criticizes him who receives and him who gives.” Ashbery intended his lectures to cut both ways: “I’m therefore going to talk about poets who have probably influenced me.” Any lineage of influence always functions as a two-way street; artists to some extent create their precursors. In these lectures, Ashbery’s own work stands as the telos for the other traditions of his title.

Each writer has been chosen in support of an ars poetica: “For me,” Ashbery writes, “poetry has its beginning and ending outside thought.” Accordingly, Clare receives praise for his “nakedness of vision” and his ability to begin a poem anywhere and end it anywhere: “Like Kierkegaard, Clare could have said of himself: ‘It seems as though I had not drunk from the cup of wisdom, but had fallen into it.’” Ashbery hails Beddoes’s work for being fragmented, Roussel’s for “the hiccuping parenthetical passages that continually frustrate and sidetrack the reader, until, ready to expire like an exhausted laboratory rat in a maze, he finds himself miraculously at the end of his wanderings, though scarcely the wiser for them.” To describe Wheelwright, whom Ashbery often finds unintelligible, he relies on the wit of W. S. Gilbert: “If this young man expresses himself in terms too deep for me/ Why, what a very singularly deep young man this deep young man must be!” It should be said that, even as it champions obscurity, Ashbery’s prose remains lucid and charming.

Riding, who “sought to reduce poetry to the bare bones of thought,” and Schubert, who mimics “the texture of thought itself” (Rachel Hadas’s phrase), come close to Ashbery’s project as he himself describes it: “I feel that my poetry is the explanation. The explanation of what? Of my thought, whatever that is. As I see it, my thought is both poetry and the attempt to explain that poetry.” Ashbery goes on to quote George Moore on the brand of pure poetry that he champions, a poetry devoid of ideas which nevertheless mimics the process of thinking: “Time cannot wither nor custom stale poetry unsicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.” This seems true in the short term, but ultimately false. Poetry steeped in the conventions and thoughts of its day becomes dated and declines only until sufficient time passes for that poetry to be treated as the product of an entirely different age, at which point it may attain a new timelessness. While poetry cannot be wholly confined to the rational, it cannot lie entirely outside of it either. One suspects that poems meant to contain just the right particular thoughts will fare better in the long run than those that deliberately eschew thought altogether.

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This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 19 Number 6, on page 75
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