SOURCE: "To Create the Self," in Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. XXIII, No. 3, October, 1977, pp. 299-313.

"From this I shall evolve a man,"¹ Wallace Stevens wrote of the mind's efforts to integrate the self by controlling a swarm of external phenomena. And in our time there are poets whose work is built on the awareness of disorder, confusion, and change, and for whom those very conditions generate the discovery of an interior life through powers above the level of reason. That self-discovery is attained by revelation that is not ultimate, as is the mystic's or the saint's; it is, however, genuine, in that the poet has broken through the limitations of conventional vision to see and to proclaim the truth of what has been seen.

The poetry of Arthur Gregor, John Ashbery, and Jean Garrigue is, each in its own way, based on genuine vision and on revelation through clouds of distress and exile. Each has developed a method of meditation through which the soul may strive toward unity of being. Central to the work of each poet is a vision of the integrated self, as well as the unification of all people and the union of people and things. Each poet dramatizes the belief in the power of art to reveal a continuous present and to cut through the limiting divisions of days, hours, and years.

Those notions are related to Plato's idea that the oneness of absolute truth, beauty, and good may be accessible to faculties above the rational. They recall Coleridge's famous concept of the Imagination:

The poet, described in ideal perfection, brings the whole soul of man into activity, with the subordination of its faculties to each other, according to their relative worth and dignity. He diffuses a tone and spirit of unity, that blends, and (as it were) fuses, each into each, by that synthetic and magical power to which we have exclusively appropriated the name of imagination. This power, first put in action by the will and understanding … reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities: of sameness, with difference; of the general, with the concrete; the idea, with the image; the individual, with the representative; the sense of novelty and freshness, with old and familiar objects; a more than usual state of emotion, with more than usual order…²

Coleridge's statement suggests that the very method of reconciliation is its aesthetic importance. So too, it is not the discovery of truth (which is, actually, the province of the mystic) but the concentration which the act of discovery demands from the poet of genuine vision.

In The Poetry of Meditation, Professor Louis L. Martz has discussed the work of seventeenth-century poets in the light of his investigation of Jesuitical methods of meditation. He writes:

A meditative poem is a work that creates an interior drama of the mind; this dramatic action is usually (though not always) created by some form of self-address, in which the mind grasps firmly a problem or situation deliberately evoked by the memory, brings it forward toward the full light of consciousness, and concludes with a moment of illumination, where the speaker's self has for a time, found an answer to its conflicts.³

[Ashbery] has created methods to transform the transcendent experience into art, as well as to reveal the self in its wholeness….

However different their methods, John Ashbery and Arthur Gregor have affinities in creating a poetry of genuine vision and in dramatizing aesthetic revelation. At the center of their work is the belief that art is a medium for knowing a hidden objective reality and revealing its beauty. That principle recalls Marianne Moore's lines: "Above particularities, / These unparticularities praise cannot violate."⁸ And like Marianne Moore, who wrote of objects in ways that expressed forces beyond them, both poets use presentative images to capture the intangible nature of things. Observations, rendered with clarity, are transformed in the process of self-discovery, and lead to perceptions of permanence.

John Ashbery's visionary poetry did not begin until later in his career, after he had devised, and discarded, various methods that would enable him to capture and render the invisible world. Since these tendencies illuminate his final achievement, however, they are essential to a study of his great vision.

From the beginning of his career, John Ashbery has been concerned with the fragmentation of modern life, and with the artist's impulse to seize that elusive moment of reality by cutting through the crowded texture of experience. In his first book, Some Trees (1956), he juxtaposes images of present life with those of the unseen, combining them as a way of inquiring into the nature of reality. In "The Instruction Manual," the speaker, writing about "the uses of a new metal,"⁹ dreams of Guadalajara, a city he "wanted most to see, and most did not see." Escape from the manual affords a glimpse into what is real—and yet this elusive beauty sends him back to the manual and to the ordinary world. Still, the imagined scene lingers, shaping the speaker's experience, its images sharpened by their remoteness from conventional vision:

How limited, but how complete withal, has been our experience of Guadalajara!
We have seen young love, married love, and the love of an aged mother for her son.
We have heard the music, tasted the drinks, and looked at colored houses.

In that first book, Ashbery's concern with visual perception recalls Whitman's passive observer in Leaves of Grass, and is reminiscent also of Emerson's belief, set forth in "The Poet," his essay, that the poet is a seer, standing at the center, courageously accepting the challenge to submit to his vision. Although the image of obtaining knowledge by sight occurs often in the book, it rings insistently in "Answering a Question in the Mountains":

We see for the first time.
We shall see for the first time.
We have seen for the first time.
The snow creeps by; many light years pass.
(Some Trees)

Embodying the young poet's visionary experience is a remarkably original use of set forms. Sestinas, sonnets, canzones, pantoums, eclogues, and other set forms are made new when given natural speech cadences and a unique music; and, in contrast, expanded lines are transformed by the devices of parallelism and internal rhyme. Here Ashbery devises forms that will frame his vision, forms that are traditional and yet sufficiently unbinding to permit the dramatization of moments when an ideal order is perceived at a time of heightened awareness, when one scene is grasped by the integrated sense. The title poem begins:

These are amazing: each
Joining a neighbor, as though speech
Were still a performance.
Arranging by chance

To meet as far this morning
From the world as agreeing
With it, you and I
Are suddenly what the trees try

To tell us we are:
That their merely being there
Means something; that soon
We may touch, love, explain.
(Some Trees)

The Tennis Court Oath (1962), incorporating a radically different approach, veers toward the world of the senses. Ashbery juxtaposes disparate images and presents fragmented scenes to approximate chaotic modern life and human division. He depicts a surface reality that assaults the mind, broken only occasionally by moments of radiant light:

Nothing can be harmed! Night and day are beginning again!
So put away the book
the flowers you were keeping to give someone:
Only the white, tremendous foam of the street has any importance,
The new white flowers thare beginning to shoot up about now.¹⁰

Ashbery's characteristic eans of dramatizing the inward search properly begins with the poems collected in Rivers and Mountains (1966). For one thing, he uses the pronoun shift to present the soul splitting apart from the seto achieve a new unity. In "A Blessing in Disguise," he utters:

And I sing amid despair and isolation
Of the chance to know you, to sing of me
Which are y You see,
You hold me up to the light …

…..

I prefer "you" in the plural, I want "you,"
You must come toe, golden and pale.
Like the dew and the air.
And then I start getting this feeling of exaltation¹¹

In this and subsequent works, the sudden shift to "you" or "he" has spiritual meaning. Even when, in some instances, "you" refers to a loved one, the pronoun implies a reflection of the eternal being; and when "he" is a human figure, the word also incorporates the renewed spirit.

Another of Ashbery's methods of enacting the interior journey resembles Arthur Gregor's method of creating a familiar scene, moving back into memory and then, in the course of meditation, discovering the relationship between the present view and the unity of seemingly disparate events. So in "The Skaters" the speaker, considering present confusion, remembering the past, achieves transcendence: "Here I am then, continuing but ever beginning / My perennial voyage …" (Rivers and Mountains).

Abandoning this method, Ashbery reached another stage in the development of his visionary poetry. Confounded by surface impressions he sought to achieve wholeness of self by isolating a fragment of sensory experience. Thus in "Fragment," placed in The Double Dream of Spring (1970), he writes of the urgent present, "A time of spotted lakes and the whippoorwill,"¹² as key to the invisible, the disguised reality.

Three Poems, consisting of prose poems called "The New Spirit" "The System," and "The Recital," is an account of the revelation enabling him to reattach apparently contradictory things to the e and to find a unifying order in the fragments of experience. "I thought that if I could put it all down, that would be one way. And next the thought came to me that to leave all out would be another, and truer, way …"¹³ he begins, describing as well the struggle of his poetry: including all sensory data, leaving them out, putting them in transformed by the poetic act.

Here Ashbery presents the disguises of reality, made of phenomena that baffle the senses:

Yet so blind are we to the true nature of reality at any given moment that this chaos—bathed, it is true, in the iridescent hues of the rainbow and clothedn an endless confusion of fair and variegated forms which did their best to stifle any burgeoning notions of the formlessness of the whole … this chaos began to seem like the normal way of being…

(Three Poems)

"The New Spirit" evolves from surrendering the self and learning to live in others, seeing all surface reality again but through the eyes of others. Doing so, you find

you have returned not to the supernatural glow of heaven but to the ordinary daylight you know so well before it passed from your view, and which continues to enrich you as it steeps you and your ageless chattels of mind, imagination, timid first love and quiet acceptance of experience in its revitalizing tide. And the miracle is not that you have returned—you always knew you would—but that things have remained the same.

(Three Poems)

Although its style is far from expository, Three Poems is a systematic declaration of Ashbery's aesthetic, and it prepares the way for his major work, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975). The amazing title poem is an enactment of that method of self-revelation in which the artist perceives all surface reality, but through the eyes of another being. Because corporeal truth mirrors the world of the invisible, the artist will see what is permanent by taking in all that is transitory. And he will come to terms with the self precisely by studying another being.

The marvelously outlandish image Ashbery uses for the lens of the other being is a distorted self-portrait painted by the master, Francesco Parmigianino. By studying the artist's likeness in the curved mirror, relinquishing the demands of the finite ego, the speaker envisions a painter who has accepted life's limitations and triumphed over them:

… there is in that gaze a combination
Of tenderness, amusement and regret so powerful
In its restraint that one cannot look for long.
The secret is too plain. The pity of it smarts,
Makes hot tears spurt: that the soul is not a soul,
Has no secret, is small, and it fits
Its hollow perfectly: its room, our moment of attention.¹⁴

By discovering his kinship with the painter's interior self—for the portrait is, in its very obliquity, of the man's inner world—the speaker sees his own life transformed:

… I see in this only the chaos
Of your round mirror which organizes everything
Around the polestar of your eyes which are empty,
Know nothing, dream but reveal nothing.
I feel the carousel starting slowly
And going faster and faster: desk, papers, books,
Photographs of friends, the window and the trees
Merging in one neutral band that surrounds
Me on all sides, everywhere I look.
(Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror)

Retreating from the portrait to examine the events of his daily life, the speaker sees all objects in the haze of Francesco's vision, and then alternates between the ideal world of art and the blight, the inertia of modern society ("Can you stand it, / Francesco? Are you strong enough for it?").

Returning to the present, the poet sees with renewed vision. He has sought "a movement / Out of the dream into its codification." And although there are no fundamental changes in the world around him, he sees its fragment made whole by the creative act. That process, we learn, is the immortality of Francesco and the survival of humankind….

Notes

¹ Wallace Stevens, The Man with the Blue Guitar, Including Ideas of Order (New York: Knopf, 1952), p. 42.

² Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. J. Shawcross (2 vols., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907), II, 12-13.

³ Louis L. Martz, The Poetry of Meditation: A Study in English Religious Literature of the Seventeenth Century (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1954), p. 330.

⁸ Marianne Moore, Complete Poems (New York: Viking/Macmillan, 1968), p. 142.

⁹ John Ashbery, Some Trees (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1956), p. 26—hereafter cited in text.

¹⁰The Tennis Court Oath: A Book of Poems (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1962). p. 35.

¹¹Rivers and Mountains (1966; New York: Ecco Press, 1977), p. 26—hereafter cited in text.

¹²The Double Dream of Spring (1970; New York: Ecco Press, 1976) p. 87.

¹³Three Poems (New York: Viking, 1972), p. 3—hereafter cited in text.

¹⁴Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (New York: Viking, 1975), p. 69—hereafter cited in text.