Ashbery, John | Jody Norton (essay date 1995)
Jody Norton (essay date 1995)
SOURCE: '"Whispers out of Time': The Syntax of Being in the Poetry of John Ashbery," in Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. XLI, No. 3, Fall, 1995, pp. 281-305.
[In the following essay, Norton analyzes Ashbery's verse in relationship to the major modes of linguistic theory and philosophy, in particular contemporary gay theory.]
The meaning of a word is its use in the language.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations
The poem is you.
—John Ashbery, Shadow Train
In describing John Ashbery's poetry, Paul Breslin speaks of a contemporary attenuation of the sense of an occasion for poetry, "since all occasions are really only the one occasion of consciousness meditating on its own frustrations." He...
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