Ashbery, John - David Fite (essay date 1981)
David Fite (essay date 1981)
SOURCE: "On the Virtues of Modesty: John Ashbery's Tactics against Transcendence," in Modern Language Quarterly, Vol. XLII, No. 1, March, 1981, pp. 65-84.
[In the following essay, Fite analyzes the opaque nature of Ashbery's verse, viewing it as an important aspect in the development of the poet's "aesthetic strategy."]
John Ashbery provides our belated time an ars poetica most notable for its determined modesty. Poetry may be "grace," as our mild-mannered poet comes to assert in his recent long poem, "Litany," but it is a grace that neither seeks nor delivers that chimerical Romantic transcendence which remains the preoccupation of many of our best poets and critics alike today. Writing cannot "transcend life, " Ashbery tells us in "Litany," precisely because "it is both / Too remote and too near. " Writing is at the same time removed from life, from "what continues," and yet part of it,...
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