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This thesis examines John Ashbery's poem "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" and its revision of the traditional distinction between theory and poetry. Drawing a relationship between the poem's subject and the practices of postmodern theoretical discourse, the thesis posits the poem as an artifact of these changes. Creating a context for the poem, these developments not only inform the climate in which Ashbery's poem takes on significance, but, as well, explain the changing nature of literary study. Historical in its approach to the pressures and impulses within this climate of aesthetic production, the thesis traces the distinction between science and literature and how it has influenced the creation of the literary discipline. Demonstrating that the disciplinary study of literature has always been the subject of debate and discussion, it uses this understanding to place present disagreements about the need or usefulness of theory in the context of historical disagreements over the difference of literature from science or philosophy. Explaining that postmodern theory has largely worked to foreground the arbitrary nature of distinctions such as that between theory and poetry, the thesis elaborates on how poststructuralism undoes these distinctions to show how they are always the result of particular political and ideological views of representation. Using this critical insight, the thesis then reads closely the details of the poem's relationship to postmodern theory, how it works to undo the distinction between theory and poetry. Having undone this traditional distinction, however, leaves the poem in an ambivalent and unstable position. Since it passes between extant categorical definitions its own nature remains undecided and, thus, maintains an engagement with and resistance to tradition. It remains caught between the need for the aesthetic past and the need for a freedom from that past. Chapter four, therefore, explores this ambivalence, particularly as it relates to the inheritance of romanticism and modernism. Finally, in chapter five, the thesis revises the main critical perception of Ashbery as postmodern, making a case for his closer affiliation with a late version of modernism. Because of Ashbery's preoccupation with the aesthetic past, his use of the imagery, insights, and idealism of our aesthetic history, he appears to re-create a distinction between high and popular art that is more consonant with a version of modernism.

This thesis explores the search for core meaning and authentic experience in the poetry of John Ashbery. Building from a close reading of A Worldly Country, it examines the way Ashbery's use of narrative fragments and shifting points of view establish poetry as an encounter with otherness that is dependent on accidents of meaning for its sense of authenticity. Comparisons with the poetry of Ashbery's most important precursor, W. H. Auden, reveal how the influence of German Romanticism emerges with different points of emphasis; Auden's richly ambiguous dualities eventually gave way to a more didactic poetry as he shifted his faith from art to religion, while Ashbery's poetry embodies the fragmented and inconclusive approach of the German poet Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), who developed, through his philosophical writings and the tales embedded in his novels, a double orientation toward the real and the ideal. Novalis confirmed the Märchen, or fairy tale, as a genre of primary importance whose capacity for imaginative excess invites accidental encounters with otherness. Analyses of fairy tales and fairy tale fragments in the work of these poets reveal how mysticism and play can inject into everyday moments feelings of self-transcendence that enable poetry to summon an authentic sense of being in the world. / Graduate

Cette étude se concentre sur l’Ecole de New York en poésie (« The New York Poets ») de la première génération (surtout John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler, et Barbara Guest) et de la second génération (surtout Bill Berkson, Alice Notley, Ted Berrigan, Eileen Myles, Anne Waldman, Ron Padgett, et Joe Brainard) – à travers la production de ces poètes (poèmes, pièces de théâtre, romans, essais, peinture-poèmes, collages, etc.). Les parallèles entre la peinture et la poésie de l’époque sont probants. Pour le poème, la peinture est à la fois un élément significatif du contexte et un facteur important d’inspiration. L’optique en examinant les textes est triple : d’abord, l’influence de l’évolution de l’art et particulièrement des stratégies des plasticiens d’avant-garde ; puis, l’influence du milieu social et du contexte des quartiers bohêmes de New York des années 1950 et 1960 ; et enfin, tout ce qui peut traduire un positionnement chez les poètes vis-à-vis de la politique et la société et le désir d’une progressivité. Ces trois facteurs s’additionnent pour s’inscrire avec une grande complexité dans les textes. / This study focusses on the poets of the New York School (« The New York Poets ») of the first generation (especially John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler, et Barbara Guest) and the second (especially Bill Berkson, Alice Notley, Ted Berrigan, Eileen Myles, Anne Waldman, Ron Padgett, et Joe Brainard) – taking into account the textual production of the poets (including poems, plays, novels, essays, poem-paintings, collages, etc.), and making a parallel study of the painting of the period, to help evoke the precise context and show relevant strands of inspiration. Works are discussed through three lenses : an idea of the evolution of art leading up to the present and particularly avant-garde artistic strategies, the influence of the social sphere including the relevance of the New York bohemia in the 1950s and 1960s, and all that conveys a sense political positioning with the desire for progress. Those three factors combine to create complexity in the texts.

Following the example of Gary Snyder's "Axe Handles," I introduce my poetics and poems in the preface. Other influences, including Lucille Clifton, John Ashbery, and Anne Carson, are also explored. The original poetry that follows the preface attempts to enact the language of philosophical exploration, relationships, memory, conversation, and meditation while paying close attention to the musicality of everyday speech and avoiding clear and specific conclusions.

ABSTRACT Genial Thinking: Frost, Stevens, Ashbery by Andrew A. Klein This dissertation explores how Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, and John Ashbery have responded to the problem of philosophical skepticism that they inherit from Emerson: that while things do in fact exist, direct knowledge of them is beyond our ken. Traditionally read within the framework of an evolving Romanticism that finds them attempting to resolve this problem through some form of synthesis or transcendence, I argue instead that these poets accept the intractability of the problem so as to develop forms of thinking from within its conditions. Chapter One explains why poetry is particularly suited to this sort of thinking and what it can achieve that philosophy (or at least a certain understanding of it) cannot. Chapter Two focuses on the act of listening in Stevens’s poetry as a way to show how Stevens is not, as is typically thought, interested in “the thing itself,” but in "the less legible meaning of sounds," the slight, keen indecision that resonates in between sense and understanding. Chapter Three focuses on those moments in Frost’s poetry when, instead of attempting to comprehend, seize, grasp, and represent reality through the use of metaphor, he chooses to regard its inappropriability or otherness. And Chapter Four focuses on how Ashbery’s constant shifts of focus are not just the wanderings of his mind, but a technique for disrupting our absorption in a single plane of attention so as to achieve new economies of engagement. Overall, though, the goal of this project is to move the discussion about this line of poets out of the epistemological register within which they are usually read and into an ethical one.

This dissertation asks how the physiological conception of the mind promoted by scientific, philosophical and cultural forces since the mid-twentieth century has affected poetic accounts of mental experience. For the cohort of poets I identify here—James Merrill, Robert Creeley, A.R. Ammons, John Ashbery, and Jorie Graham—recognition that fallible, biological mechanisms determine the very structure of human subjectivity causes deep anxiety about how we perceive the world, exercise reason, and produce knowledge. These poets feel caught between the brain sciences’ empirical vision of the mind, which holds the appeal of a fresh and credible vocabulary but often appears reductive, and the literary tradition’s overwhelmingly transcendental vision of the mind, which bears intuitive resonance but also appears increasingly naïve. These poets find aesthetic opportunity in confronting the nature of mind: Merrill takes up forgetting as a central subject, making elegant, entropic monuments out of the distortions and perforations of embodied memory; Ammons and Creeley become captivated by the motion of thinking, and use innovative, dynamic forms to emphasize the temporal and spatial impositions of embodiment upon the motions of thought; Ashbery luxuriates in the representational possibilities of distraction as a structural and thematic principle; Graham identifies the anatomical limits of the visual system with our limits of empathetic perspective, conceiving of her poems as prostheses that can enhance our feeble power to imagine other minds. In a host of significatory practices that reimagine lyric subjectivity in physiological terms, these poets’ ambitious and influential oeuvres reveal the convergence of “raw” and “cooked” post-war poetries in a set of fundamental suppositions about our aptitudes as observers, knowers, and interpreters; this convergence exposes the vestiges of the Romantic mind in modernism’s empowered conception of the poetic imagination. Uniquely equipped to explore meaningful correspondences between physiological and literary form, the contemporary lyric defies the novel’s preeminent position in the study of literary consciousness by demonstrating an enterprising talent for philosophical investigation of the experience of mind.

This thesis reads John Ashbery as a major poetic thinker about nature whose work convenes a multitude of nature writing traditions, from classical pastoral to the 21st-century eco-sublime. Challenging a critical consensus that would cast Ashbery as either a belated romantic in search of lost nature or an arch-postmodernist who dissolves "nature" into text, this study reveals his deep historical awareness of the transmission and collision of literary ecologies. The poet who emerges delights in putting different poetic natures into contact with each other—and in humorously making nature unnatural. Surveying Ashbery’s long historical moment, the thesis uses four terms of critique—transparency, vagrancy, flow, and badness—to map his "invisible terrain." Chapter one historicizes Ashbery’s turn to a poetics of contradictory "transparencies" during his sojourns in France from 1956-1965 and his concurrent dream of writing poems that would be like "natural landscapes" in a world of "painted ones." Chapter two considers the pastoral and anti-pastoral topoi of Ashbery’s Vietnam-era poetry and his tendency to "wander away" from political commitment. Chapter three examines Ashbery’s recurrent tropes of "flow" and his tendency to literalize the stream-of-consciousness metaphor and "dissolve" his own style at decisive moments of his career. Chapter four reads the "bad" nature poetry of Ashbery’s late period (1987 to the present) as the culmination of a career-long investment in camp irony’s "good taste of bad taste" and as a response to ecological crisis. The coda, a survey of Ashbery’s critical prose, examines his penchant for “a completely new kind of realism."

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