"Set free on an ocean of language that comes to be part of us": John Ashbery and the influence of Emerson, Whitman, James, and Stevens.
Item
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Title
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"Set free on an ocean of language that comes to be part of us": John Ashbery and the influence of Emerson, Whitman, James, and Stevens.
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Identifier
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AAI9108175
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identifier
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9108175
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Creator
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Sloan, Benjamin.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Joan Richardson
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Date
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1990
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, American
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Abstract
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In assuming that an understanding of John Ashbery's more recent poetry will be enhanced by a detailed thinking through of the ways in which he has been influenced by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Henry James, and Wallace Stevens, this dissertation opens with a discussion of the special status given to individual sentences in the work of Emerson, James and Ashbery. Next The Ambassadors, The Golden Bowl, and particular Ashbery poems are discussed as examples illustrating the way Emerson's notions of "abandonment" and "rhapsody" form the basis for a line of development shared by James and Ashbery. Throughout the dissertation an emphasis is placed upon close readings of individual works drawn from Houseboat Days (1977), As We Know (1979), Shadow Train (1981), and A Wave (1984) so as to consider if and how specific aspects of a variety of poems can find their counterparts in the body of literature under consideration here. In Chapter Three a remark of Harold Bloom's (that "even as his (Ashbery's) father is Stevens, his largest ancestor is Whitman, and it is the Whitman strain in Stevens that found Ashbery") is used as a starting point in an exploration of the way Emerson introduces a set of concerns we see advanced in the work of Whitman, Stevens, and Ashbery. In establishing connections here, two important points of reference are Louis Martz's The Poetry of Meditation and G. J. Whitrow's What Is Time? Ultimately what we witness is the way that, carrying to a logical extreme Emerson's meditation on the nature of the self and Einstein's vision of the universe, Ashbery moves out ahead of his readers as he uses language to reformulate his self and explore the always unexpected place where his consciousness is now.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
