Helen McNeil, a British critic writing in the Times Literary Supplement, has said that "since the death of Robert Lowell, the title of most important American poet has been on offer to John Ashbery." Countless other critics have registered similar judgments. And as if all that were not enough, the government of the United States commissioned Ashbery to write a poem for the bicentennial. Ashbery responded, with all due mockery, with "Pyrography."…

Ashbery's famous "difficulty" … has not seemed to pose an obstacle to his acclaim. This is partially due, no doubt, to the cachet difficult poems have had recently (the less one understands a poem, the better it must be), but mainly to his incredible perseverance: Ashbery's latest book, Shadow Train, is his tenth in under twenty years. His seemingly immaculately planned career is, as he says in two telling lines from a poem in this book, "too perfect in its outrageous / Regularity to be called to stand trial again."

If Ashbery had ever been on trial in the past, it was because his method was not understood. Once one grasps that method—as well as its philosophical sources and influences—one understands how the poetry is generated (although not what it is about). As Ashbery himself once noted, rather than dealing specifically with problems, issues, or feelings, his method seeks to reproduce "the actions of a mind at work or rest." A typical Ashbery poem attempts to focus attention on its own content—formless, arbitrary, free-associational fragments—rather than on any ostensible subject matter or point. Ashbery once claimed that he rarely rewrites, for the poetry's craft and "meaning" are automatically "there" in the words first put down on paper. He also claims to begin often with a title, since "there are many ways of getting pushed into a poem and they're all valid." The lines of an Ashbery poem seem less the natural products of an emotion or idea than insertions, and the overall result is, as other commentators have noticed, similar to an abstract expressionist painting—fractured and indistinct. (p. 62)

An Ashbery poem is sometimes as discontinuous in its style as in its logic. Syntactical contortions, endless parenthetical remarks, and ellipses are typical—as if the linear requirements of grammar were too constricting for the poet's roller-coaster of associative thoughts. Often Ashbery abruptly changes tense or person…. Ashbery likes to be interrupted in the act of composition—by the telephone, by an advertisement on the radio—so he can incorporate these extraneous snippets to vary the poem's music. Indeed, all of Ashbery's language seems taken from other sources, making the poems sound oddly rehearsed. Even symbols and literary allusions, when they are used, refer more to their secondhand nature than to any fresh poetic idea. Ashbery's typical tone is flat, nasal, unenthused: the emotions, like the images, seem to be used or false—certainly of no great consequence to the poet himself.

In the early 1950's, after a period of intense depression and inactivity, Ashbery attended a concert of John Cage's Music of Changes with his friend and fellow poet, the late Frank O'Hara. Ashbery recalls: "It was a series of dissonant chords, mostly loud, with irregular rhythm. It went on for over an hour and seemed infinitely extendable. I felt profoundly refreshed after hearing that. I started to write again shortly afterwards. I felt that I could be as singular in my art as Cage was in his." This inspiration resulted in, to use the title of an Ashbery poem written a few years later, a "new realism," which, like Cage's music, rejects the laws of perspective, logic, and narration in favor of randomness and discontinuity.

The roots of this "new realism," however, were in the (then) thirty-year-old French artistic movement known as surrealism, which, under the auspices of the writers André Breton, Paul Eluard, and Guillaume Apollinaire, and the painters René Magritte, Giorgio de Chirico, and Salvador Dali, fostered outrageous blends in their art of the familiar and the improbable…. What particularly caught Ashbery's attention, however, was the surrealists' (especially de Chirico's) poeticization of the banal and subordination of the crafting or organizing sensibility. As Breton, the acknowledged leader of the movement, declared, true literary art should consist of "[a] monologue that flows as rapidly as possible on which the critical spirit of the subject brings no judgment to bear … and which will reproduce as exactly as possible spoken thought."

Toward such a goal each verbal unit (images as well as words) of "spoken thought" has equal value and, more importantly, has value in and of itself rather than in relation to other verbal units or to any overarching (read: oppressive) poetic idea. Hence no "correct" balance exists between the particular and the general, or between abstraction and detail, and the resulting disjunct verse contains no specific meaning, at least the kind one would expect. As David Shapiro writes in a recent book on Ashbery [see excerpt above], "If meaning is 'what anything suggests,' Ashbery often attempts paradoxically to present a blank configuration of words" that not only are interpretation-proof but offer a "labyrinth of possible denotations and possible lack of denotations."

What, then, does this poetry concern itself with? The answer is: itself—its inconclusiveness, its antinomianism, its absurdism, and, above all, its deep distrust of language that naively attempts statements about reality and reality's possible meaning. Ashbery's poetry is, in a word, self-referential. (pp. 62-3)

Bits of self-reflexiveness occur in Ashbery's first book, Some Trees, published originally in 1956. But essentially this book consists of, in the words of Shapiro, "parodies of narration" in which the cadence and look of typical narrative poetry are used in the service of poems which, if they are not meaningless altogether, at least attempt to undermine their "announced" subjects. For example, in the apparently autobiographical poem, "The Portrait of Little J. A. in a Prospect of Flowers," clarity of image and smooth linguistic simplicity reveal absolutely nothing substantial about the poet's childhood, which one vaguely senses was full of importance (particularly regarding his sexual development). Instead, Ashbery writes around his life, and then at the end of the poem comments on this process, capping it with a slice of jarringly false nostalgia….

Ashbery snubs the standard poetic contemplation of youth by ironically "rescuing" his past by means of extraneous images and a cool remove that scants the pain and urgency of childhood. The more traditional effect of reminiscence (such as forcing the poet to reevaluate his present life or reconcile it to the past) is replaced with the unexpected one of reevaluating the method of the poem itself. These lines supply a foretaste of Ashbery's later, more ambitious self-reflexive experiments…. (p. 63)

Ashbery's quarrel with causality and referentiality takes a different form in his second book, The Tennis Court Oath (1963). Instead of modulated ironic narratives and false limpidity Ashbery resorts to the syntactically, grammatically, and metaphorically disjunct poetry of collage…. Following the lead of the painter Robert Rauschenburg, Ashbery admits everything into [the long poem] "Europe": stray bits from newspapers, lopped-off phrases from children's books, bad poetry, and loose thoughts from the back of the poet's mind—all frosted over with an equalizing emotional deadness. Like the pieces of a painter's collage, the words refer to themselves and to the "idea" of collage. Entrance requirements for the poem are gratuitousness and error…. About "Europe" Ashbery remarked, "I didn't know what I wanted to do, but I did know what I didn't want to do."

In his next two books, Rivers and Mountains (1967) and The Double Dream of Spring (1970), the title of which is taken from a painting by de Chirico, Ashbery moves back from opaque collage to the smooth ironic cadences of his early poems. But there is a wider range of feelings that are the butt of his irony….

In these volumes Ashbery still writes radically anti-causal verse. In a note to one group of poems in Double Dream the poet says that he wrote them first "in French and translated them myself into English, with the idea of avoiding customary word-patterns and associations." He also depends heavily on clichés, as in "Decoy," which uses a good number of the pseudo-political, or particularly banal industrial-newsletter, type…. The entire poem, couched in such jargon, leads nowhere … and ends with [a] false conclusion….

Ashbery's world of irony and parody continues full-steam in his next book, comically titled Three Poems [1972], for the book actually consists of three long free-associational prose works ("I don't know what poetic means," says the poet)—"antinomian confessions" in the Christian tradition, as Shapiro points out, but, of course, contemporary ones of "discontinuity and revolt." (p. 64)

This most obscurely private of Ashbery's books was followed, in 1976, by his most accessible, the award-winning Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, which contains more reflexive "guides" to the poetry than any other collection. In fact, the title poem's statements of method intrude more and more as the poem proceeds—until they become the poem itself…. [This poem discusses] its own verbal "flatness," anti-logical bias, condescension to "old" subjects, and the poet's refusal to reveal anything below the surface of the poem…. (p. 65)

In a rare moment in Self-Portrait Ashbery deals expressly with an issue: his inability, as a poet, to have a "traditional" transcendent experience, and the result ["As I Came from the Holy Land"] is probably the best thing in the book…. This poem, the title of which is taken from Sir Walter Raleigh's haunting poem about the durability of the idea of love, as opposed to its earthly variation, poignantly expresses the poet's "lateness" in history in the same way "Answering a Question in the Mountains" in Some Trees does ("It is late to be late."). But here Ashbery dispenses with irony, parody, and the usual drabness of feeling. For once, the poem's rhythm is synchronized to its emotional level. It seems as if the proximity of the transcendent experience inspired Ashbery to share his vision rather than preempt it for a discourse on method.

In Houseboat Days (1977), however, Ashbery returns to writing poems that profess their own nonproductivity…. In "Litany," from As We Know (1979), Ashbery goes back to his disjunct style, this time in the form of a two-columned poem designed to be read simultaneously and aloud, creating a disharmonious jangle. The poem's two private voices perhaps most aggressively indicate Ashbery's belief in the insurmountable separateness of two minds. The rest of As We Know resembles Houseboat Days (the latter is perhaps slightly more inspired) except for a group of poems the titles of which are longer than the actual poems; parodies, it would seem, of the worst of Richard Brautigan (for what reason, one can only guess).

Shadow Train, Ashbery's new book, parodies the national mood of retrenchment and specifically the new conservatism of form and representation in the arts (notably painting) with a tidy package of fifty poems of identical length (sixteen lines) and structure (four stanzas). But beneath the surface the poet is up to the same old tricks—only worse. (pp. 65-6)

The poet's concern with the autonomy of language takes on an especially jejune cast in Shadow Train….

On the whole the book casts a bleak, if sometimes comic, shadow—more diffuse than usual (one is less sure in this book why the poet is so obscurely despairing), but then, Ashbery never promised things would get better, or, for that matter, clearer.

If the foregoing successfully describes the curious and unique nature of John Ashbery's poetry, it would certainly seem a non sequitur to say that his work is Romantic, in the line of Keats, Wordsworth, and Tennyson. Yet Helen Vendler … says just that [see excerpt above]. (p. 66)

[Miss Vendler contends that Ashbery] "comes from Wordsworth, Keats, Tennyson, Stevens, Eliot; his poems are about love, or time, or age."

What can be said for this view? One thing that Ashbery's free-associational technique and surrealism allow, as we have seen, is freedom of form and content. The fact that anything gains admittance to the poem, as well as the fact that Ashbery's linguistic resources are quite deep, will make for a wide range of words that could be construed to be "about" love, time, or age. (It should be pointed out in passing that in this essay, as in Miss Vendler's, only Ashbery's understandable lines have been quoted; at least 80 percent of the total are not readily graspable at all.) But does an obscure or unintegrated utterance amid self-reflexive ruminations and misleading metaphors—"yellow flowers," or "bed"—mean the poem is a love poem?…

The Romantics' obsessive investigation of their political, moral, and imaginative relation to the external world is profoundly opposed to Ashbery's self-reflexive tap dance. Ashbery's "contradictoriness"—another supposed likeness to the Romantics—is not couched, as it is for them, in dialectic. The Romantic poets bartered with the world; Ashbery, with himself. Whether it is the early automatism or the later poems constructed from slogans, TV news, and doggerel, there is no imaginative interaction with the sensual world—not even any moments of illumination; his banal objects remain brutally dull….

The single point that connects Ashbery with the Romantics is his attempted creation of a "new world." Yet would Words-worth or even Stevens approve of something so disharmonious, denigrating, without energy, lacking transcendental effect, and, to most readers, utterly incomprehensible? (p. 67)

Ashbery's quick cutting from one thought to another is, according to Miss Vendler, part of a "consoling aesthetic, since by its standards every utterance is privileged as a nonce affair; it is also mournful, since it considers art as fleeting as life." This rather somber consideration does not take into account the unconsoling thought, suggested by Ashbery's poetry, that nothing could (or presumably should) be looked into at all…. Ashbery himself has admitted that at times he does not know where he is going in a poem, and lacks a subject—how is this to be reconciled with Miss Vendler's assertion that Ashbery has "borrowed from Stevens the trick of working up obliquely to his subject, so that the subject itself makes a rather late appearance in the poem"? Miss Vendler's own generous "deep trust" of Ashbery's associative processes—necessary in a critic—is hardly paid back in kind.

In a bold attempt to vindicate Ashbery's emotional coldness, Miss Vendler writes: "Oddly enough, our first response to emotional pain all around us, down in the cisterns, up in the gutters, is to deny we are feeling it." If this startling remark were true of our poets, their art would soon die for lack of blood. Fortunately, this is in general not the case. It is too true, however, that one vainly searches in Ashbery's poetry for some verbal correlative to the pain of loss, disillusion, unrequited love, or, on the positive side, to the warmth of friendship…. Instead, one finds the isolation of self-reflexivity…. (pp. 67-8)

Miss Vendler finds Ashbery's poetry hopeful…. Yet the more one of his poems says, the more embarrassed and the less hopeful it becomes. Also, the more knowledge it imparts, the less it succeeds; the more it displays the poet's learning, the less it educates; and the more the poetry resembles the voice of a living, breathing man, the less it is "itself." One would think that, if anything, Ashbery's poetry of non-production—involving endless linguistic copulation with no creation—threatens to destroy the enterprise of art altogether. Like the surrealists, who frightened even Sartre for this reason, Ashbery's radicalism is purely negative. Self-referentiality breaks down the vital link between the object and the world; the idea that the mind is a conduit breaks down the attachment between the object and thought. Artaud could have been referring to Ashbery when he said that the "surrealist despairs of attaining his own mind," for Ashbery replaces mind—represented in poetry by a strong and stable "I"—with a theory or code.

One might say this is, to one degree or another, true of all poets. With Ashbery, however, a serious claim has been entered that the importance lies entirely in the theory and not in what rises out of it. "It is as though poetry were incompetent to see its own image until reflected in the discursive language of criticism," says Miss Vendler. "And it may be so." Shapiro agrees: "The best poetry of our day is … a form of literary criticism." Such gross absurdities could only be uttered in an age that has little use for poets.

The "dark idolatry of the self" which Shelley feared has become a reality in contemporary art, and its poetic avatar of the moment is John Ashbery. His impressive linguistic inventiveness, and his unique voice, have been placed in the service of what Shapiro honestly calls an "icy, autocratic humiliation of the reader." Only a critic still anxious, as Helen Vendler is, to will some connection between poetry and human life and the human world could write of Ashbery that he "makes us feel more and more a part of a human collectivity," when the truth is more nearly the opposite. But as a young woman poet said to me when Shadow Train appeared: "It's like Marxism. You lie often enough and people will believe you." (p. 68)

Robert Richman, "Our 'Most Important' Living Poet," in Commentary (reprinted by permission; all rights reserved), Vol. 74, No. 1, July, 1982, pp. 62-8.