John Ashbery and American Poetry - Softcover

Herd, David

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0719080592 ISBN 13: 9780719080593

Publisher: Manchester University Press, 2009

Synopsis

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.

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.

About this title

About the Author

David Herd is Senior Lecturer in English and American Literature at the University of Kent, Canterbury

From Publishers Weekly

In the poetry trade, what often unites the dullest "workshop" conservative and the wildest experimentalist is a shared regard for the poems of Ashbery, even if they are often different poems. But what also unites every reader of Ashbery is the mystery of how his singular achievement came to be, of how the poet developed and sustained a body of work at once so intimate and unknowable. A lecturer in English and French literature at the University of Kent, Herd, in his extraordinarily lucid and jargon-free monograph, is smart enough not to attempt a definitive answer to such questions, but his command of the materials that prompt the questions can only illuminate numerous aspects of Ashbery's long and complex career. Herd's basic thesis that Ashbery's ambition is to write a poem "fit for its occasion," in which the writer and reader (and speaker, as well) come "face to face with the now in which everything must happen" is convincing, but the strength of the book is that he doesn't keep hammering away at it. Herd's "close readings" are just that, never straying pointlessly far from the poems in question, but always alive to their paradoxes. Likewise, Herd's use of secondary sources, including input from such pivotal but nowadays rarely cited figures as Paul Goodman, Philip Rahv and C. Wright Mills, is always at the service of understanding. Like all good criticism, this book sends the reader eagerly back to the works in question; it would be a shame if it were read only in academia, for it has much to offer any reader interested in the recent history of American poetry.

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About this edition

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0719080592
• ISBN 13: 9780719080593
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 245