John Ashbery's essayism

Abstract

This dissertation reads John Ashbery’s poetry in the context of essayism and skeptical, pragmatic, and phenomenological philosophy. Essayism stems from Montaigne’s method for testing ideas without requiring final resolution and occurs in a variety of genres to explore possibilities with the skeptical doubt that the whole of anything can be seen; ideas are presented as a succession of experiments. Essayism considers philosophical concerns with “deliberate uncertainty,” assaying them by means of digression and interrogation. Ashbery adopts this essayistic attitude of inquiry in order to pursue his “broad” subject of “an individual consciousness confronting or confronted by a world of external phenomena.” His poetry continually probes existence as a dynamic relationship between a being and its world; this view evokes the phenomenological ontology of Heidegger, who defines existence as “being-in-the-world.” Ashbery’s poetry also suggests William James’s pragmatism, which looks toward real-world consequences rather than abstract principles, and James’s “stream of consciousness,” which takes into account the vague fringes of consciousness. I discuss the beginnings of Ashbery’s essayism in his early poetry, but focus primarily on his long works, each of which adopts a different form to answer the “major question that revolves around you, your being here.” The forms of Three Poems, Flow Chart, and Girls on the Run are meditative prose, autobiography, and narrative, respectively. Ashbery thereby addresses the same question from changing perspectives to attain a more complete view of his subject. Calling himself “a bricoleur as far as philosophy goes,” he reads philosophy that considers the contingent nature of experience and does not rely primarily on theoretical systematism; thus, the tentative method of essayism provides a complementary mode for the expression of his thought. I approach Ashbery’s poetry from two angles: how essayism’s philosophical inquiry motivates his poetry and what it uncovers. As a pragmatist, Ashbery asks ontological questions to help him determine, provisionally, his place among the phenomena in his experience. As a poet, Ashbery enlivens this process and his ideas with his unique language, style, and wit; he not only seeks to widen his circle of consciousness, but also acknowledges life’s dimly felt, incomprehensible mysteries.