Subjectivity, Language, and Loneliness in the Poetry of John Ashbery: A Social Reading

Open Access
- Author:
- Hillier, David Nathan
- Area of Honors:
- English
- Degree:
- Bachelor of Arts
- Document Type:
- Thesis
- Thesis Supervisors:
- Mark Stewart Morrisson, Thesis Supervisor
Mark Stewart Morrisson, Thesis Supervisor
Janet Wynne Lyon, Thesis Honors Advisor - Keywords:
- Ashbery
Avant-Garde
McCarthy
Subjectivity
Solipsism
Social
The Tennis Court Oath
Three Poems - Abstract:
- For all the countless ways critics have represented John Ashbery, there has unfortunately been a relative shortage of readings that seek to understand him as a socially-minded poet. Ashbery as the charter of his own private consciousness is a more common interpretational trend, but views of Ashbery’s poetry that over-stress such “privacy” may neglect and misrepresent important themes and techniques that characterize his work. Rather than going the other way and simply ignoring those aspects of Ashbery’s poetry that lead to meditations on privately individual subjectivity (or even draw out labels of solipsism), my thesis interprets them as components of a broader struggle by Ashbery to develop his socially situated poetics. Building on contextual arguments about the social necessity of a reformulated avant-garde amid the homophobia of the McCarthy era, my thesis interprets the concerns initiated in Ashbery’s life and poetry during that time as gestating into broader examinations of the social realm and subjectivity (specifically its potential to approach either solipsism or intersubjective connection). In my readings of The Tennis Court Oath and Three Poems, I argue that Ashbery’s treatment of thoroughly communal language and conceptualizations of selfhood as deeply social necessitate a view of the poet as fundamentally engaged in the social world. Equally important to my thesis, however, is the understanding that Ashbery seeks to approach and develop the social realm by simultaneously examining the strictures of subjectivity ⎯ particularly the shortcomings of its language ⎯ that present solipsism as a constant threat against the emotional and communal possibilities of social interaction. Focusing primarily on The Tennis Court Oath and Three Poems, two of Ashbery’s most stylistically distinct books, my thesis provides a paradigm through which varied elements in Ashbery’s collected works can be viewed.