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But What Is The Reader To Make of This

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352 views

But What Is The Reader To Make of This

Uploaded by

Ams Sagittarius
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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BUT WHAT IS THE READER TO MAKE OF THIS

JOHN ASHBERY

Author:

John Ashbery ( July 28,1927- September 3,2017). He

was an American poet and art critic. He was

recognised as one of the greatest 20th century

American poets. He was considered as the most

influential American poet of his time. Oxford

university literary critic John Bayley wrote that

Ashbery”sounded in poetry, the standard tones of

the age”. Ashbery published more than 20 volumes

of poetry and won nearly every major American


awards for poetry including a Pulitzer prize in 1976

for his collection self portrait in a convex mirror.

Ashbery said he wished his work to be accessible to

as many people as possible not a private dialogue

with himself.

He also published a piece of short fiction and a

handful of poems including sonnets. His earlier

work shows the influence of Auden along with

Wallace Stevens, Boris Pasternak . Ashbery’s poetry

challenges its readers to discard all presumption

about the aims, themes, and stylistic scaffolding of

verse in favour of literature that reflects upon the


limits of language and the volatility of

consciousness. Ashbery first book Some Trees won

the Yale younger poets prize. He published a spate

of successful and influential collection in the

1960&1970’s including The Tennis court oath ,The

double dream of spring, Self portrait in a convex

mirror, and Houseboat Days.

Analysis:

Critic noted how Ashbery poetry took shape under

the influence of abstract expressionism. Modern art

was the first and the most powerful influence on

Ashbery. His style self reflexive, multi phonic,


vaguely narrative, full of both pop culture and high

allusions. Even his strongest supporters agreed that

his poetry is difficult to read and willfully difficult to

understand. He attempted to mirror the stream of

perception of which human consciousness is

composed. His poetry is open ended and multi

various because of life itself. His poems moves

often without continuity, from one image to the

next.

Summary:

Ashbery’s poems are generally obscure. It is also a

difficult poetry. The author makes it so vague that a


reader can read almost anything into the poem. He

sometimes says that “I sometimes don’t know what

the poem means”. This poem is probably about

poetry . It is a poem on a poem. It probably calls for

a reader response criticism. He also speaks about

the immense capacity the poem holds. We are

introduced into the space of the poem. ‘ A lake of

pain, an absence which leads to flowering sea’ talks

about the variety of feelings and sensibilities that

the poems are capable of. A poem is a space where

the temporal is overturned. A poem is a vast spatial

and temporal organisms that holds within itself a


capacity for multiple sensibilities, feelings and

emotions. There is a capacity for tenderness in

human mind, as there are sweet and dark words in

poetry . It is the personal interior life that gives us

something to think about. Everything else is drama.

Human beings are the background of any poem and

we make things happen. The interosity and personal

also matter’s. The entire poem is woven in the

multiplicity of life and death , fact and fiction and

how literature would reflect the interior as well as

exterior. Though it begins with the idea of what is

the reader to make of this probably the poem is


inviting us not to look at poetry as a space of

weaving life but what does a reader make of life as

such. Life which is a composite of whole multiple

things where interior is as important as exterior,

where we are constantly Feld between life and

death as many others. It is the interior that matters.

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