John Ashbery's revision of the post-romantic quest: meaning, evasion, and allusion in "Grand Galop."

This whirling away from the quest and the confrontation it implies with mortality, failure, and all the frustrations of the mind and heart upon which the whole poem has been built, cannot be sustained. Instead of the consoling vision of a new order Ashbery collapses back into the language of the doomed seeker caught in his predicament: "But now we are at Cape Fear and the overland trail / Is impassable, and a dense curtain of mist hangs over the sea" (21). The poem that began with an invocation of organic unity ends by leaving us in medias res, just as the last glimpse Browning gives us of Childe Roland is his blowing the horn announcing his readiness for the challenge.

Except for Harold Bloom's reading, and in Andrew Ross's recent somewhat haughty dismissal of those who would read "Self-Portrait" like one of "Browning's Quattrocento vignettes" (165), Browning as a precursor for Ashbery has received little attention. For a poet as elusive as Ashbery, Browning's astute use of masks and indirection might represent a model for both exploration and self-protection. If Ashbery first appropriates Browning's poem to imagine an outcome or success directly at odds with his predecessor's work (Childe Roland "victorious" in Three Poems), he eventually comes around to carrying Browning's vision even further in "Grand Galop," where the incidental characters are more grotesque, the predicament more hopeless, and the symbolic tower even more diminished. Ashbery is ironizing further an already ironic version of the quest, one in which he, like Browning's hero, is haunted throughout by his foreknowledge of his own failure. If the source of Childe Roland's odd heroism is that he proceeds in spite of this knowledge, it is an essential aspect of the heroic nature of Ashbery's project to proceed with his search even though he knows equally well that his quest will not be fulfilled.

In its range, energy, and vitality, "Grand Galop" worthily complements and is complemented by "Self-Portrait"'s stately and sustained concentration on a single theme. "Grand Galop" achieves its greatness in the way in which it manages to be passionately, scrupulously faithful to the whole process of the striving mind, as it tries to reconcile itself to the world through art, history, personal habit, or willed acceptance. Ultimately there is no center upon which this desire of the mind can establish itself before either the force of the world or the mind's own resources undo it. Although Ashbery in Three Poems established that no synthesis was to be achieved, it is in "Grand Galop" that he intensifies his poetic search for that synthesis and gives consummate expression to the ardor and anguish to which this foredoomed quest gives rise.

NOTES

(1) Thomas Hood, New Monthly Magazine LVIII.155. (2) Typical, however, of Molesworth's attitude toward Ashbery's endeavor is that, having grudgingly praised "Grand Galop," he goes on to observe, "There are at least two poems of inconsequence in Self-Portrait" (177). (3) Huybensz also claims that Ashbery "presents himself as incapable of understanding his own experience, handling his own life, or communicating about it to others," taking for a final conclusion what is only one tonal element of the poem's complex of motives. (4) In this respect Ashbery has suffered somewhat from the services of his defenders. Sympathetic and perspicacious a critic as Altieri is, look at the way he tries to state the poetry's claim on our attention: "We are asked to participate in acts of mind that attribute motives for acts and invite analysis of the motives for the attribution of motives. The |motives of motives' is Ashbery's version of the |meaning of meaning'" (149). Running one's pennant up a flagpole pitched on one of the remoter deserts of epistemology only provides any number of factions hungry for poetry with a bit of blood in it further evidence of Ashbery's being arid and esoteric.