John Ashbery and American Poetry

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Manchester University Press, 2000 - Literary Criticism - 245 pages
A discussion of the poetry of John Ashbery. Showing that a sense of occasion - the sense that the poem should be fit for its occasion - was a binding principle for the poets of the New York School, David Herd traces the development of Ashbery's poetry in the light of this idea. The book is a study of Ashbery's career and also a history of the period in which that career has taken shape. The development of Ashbery's poetic is set against such culturally defining issues as: the institutionalisation of literature; the rise and fall of the avant-garde; mass culture; Vietnam; the absence of a divine presence; the erosion of tradition; the growth of celebrity; and the emergence of AIDS. Ashbery's responses to such issues are set against the work of Lowell, Berryman, O'Hara, Koch, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Oppen and Larkin.

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Contents

the early poetry and its backgrounds
26
collaboration and the New York School
52
The Tennis Court Oath and the poetics
69
experiment and declaration in Rivers
93
the sceptical tradition of Three Poems
124
the communicative value of Self
144
the poet and his communities
179
the sense of an ending in recent
207
Bibliography
223
Index
241
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About the author (2000)

David Herd is Senior Lecturer in English and American Literature at the University of Kent

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