"Poetic Attention" reveals how John Ashbery's ties with past literary traditions elucidate his own personal aesthetic. Starting with a review of Ashbery's critical reception, the thesis shows how Ashbery's poetry and its reception are polarized in two major post-Romantic approaches to poetry: the Romantic, and the "objectivist" tradition of modernism. Beginning with a look at how Ashbery's early poetry reflects both paradigms, I focus on moments where both are simultaneously active. I demonstrate how impressionism, as a sensibility with certain methodological, epistemological, and technical concerns and devices having to do with the conjunction of consciousness and the world in perception, best describes the interaction between Ashbery's Romantic and modernist strains. Impressionism helps us understand how Ashbery negotiates the Romantic desire for resolutions to spiritual crises and the modernist focus on objects in and of themselves by treating a searching attentiveness to those objects as a value in itself.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.79959 |
| Date | January 2003 |
| Creators | Lennox, John, 1980- |
| Contributors | Hickman, Miranda (advisor) |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Master of Arts (Department of English.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 002149638, proquestno: AAIMQ98459, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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