"The tension is in the concept": John Ashbery's surrealism

Notes

(1) Wolf aligned Ashbery with Abstract Expressionism, but his poetry has been too diverse to allow any integral identification with a particular movement. David Sweet and David Bergman have successfully corrected his view. Sweet is the author of the most satisfactory analysis of Ashbery's relationship with the painterly avant-garde at large, pointing at his kinship with marginal figures and precursors of surrealism. He argues that Ashbery's "ritual collagism" is characteristic of surrealism and does not fit in with Abstract Expressionism (324). Bergman goes deeper in his rejection of "'lack of finish" in Ashbery's surfaces, which he sees instead as overworked in the Mannerist style of Parmigianino, partly revived in this century by de Chirico (xxi-xxii). Bergman refutes Wolf's dismissive treatment of specific works and authors mentioned in the poems, claiming de Chirico as a "touchstone" in Ashbery's career, without further elaborating this point (xiv). I will argue here that the relevance of de Chirico cannot be overstressed. Indeed, this essay aims primarily to explore his influence on Ashbery and traces the recurrence of metaphysical aesthetics during almost twenty years of Ashbery's poetic production under--I borrow Robert Rosenblum's phrase--de Chirico's "long American shadow."

(2) Apparently--perhaps not surprisingly--most critics who are hostile to the early Ashbery are also fierce enemies of surrealism. Hence my use of "trivialized," which in fact means that these critics renounce further exploration once the fearful diagnostic has been reached. There is a whole tradition of Ashbery detractors demanding meaning in his poetry, including Robert Boyers (1978), Charles Molesworth (1979), and James Fenton (1985), among others. Fenton's review is titled "Getting Rid of the Burden of Sense," quoting a line from Ashbery that I also use here, with decidedly different intentions.

(3) For a convincing refutation of Ashbery's rejection of other French influences, see Ford.

(4) Richard Howard would be an exception here, for he pointed as early as 1970 that de Chirico's "oneiric dissociations are the kind of thing Ashbery himself aspires to" (45).

(5) Ashbery's thirty years of art criticism, collected in Reported Sightings, would simply not make any sense without his constant references to the Italian, who is praised as a major figure in the development of twentieth-century painting.

(6) Howard delights in the way "many writers have provided a clue in the form of an imaginative schema or construct which heightens the work's inner resonance at the same time that it defines the poetics by which the contraption operates" (26-27). He explains that for Gide the epitome of this technique was the heraldic suspension of a second, identical blazon in the center of the first. Gide's literary examples are classics like Hamlet's "Mousetrap" and Las Meninas. For a compelling study of this device see Dallenbach.