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Discuss major themes in Ashberys poetry

with reference to the poems in syllabus
Poet and critic, who has deeply influenced American poetry from the 1970s. Ashbery is
the best-known poet of the New York School. His work is characterized by originality,
impressionistic elegance, and dark themes of death and terror as evidenced by his lines,
The locking into place is death. In the 1950s Ashbery adopted to his poetry techniques
used by such abstract painters as Willem Kooning and Jackson Pollock.
In The Painter, we see surrealistic techniques employed. He also was interested in the
music of John Cage and his poem, Melodic Trains has been written in a musicalmusing style. Charles Altieri, in Self and Sensibility in Contemporary American
Poetry, labels Ashbery the major poet of our minor age. Ashbery himself commented
in The Invisible Avant-Garde, that Artists are no fun once they have been discovered
and it seems that his poetry is an attempt to elude what Eliot called the lemon
squeezing school of criticism. The main purpose of Ashberys poetry as Ashbery
himself asserted is:
to record a kind of generalized transcript of whats really going on in
our minds all day
The best example is Melodic Trains which is innovative and based on stream of
consciousness technique recording a real transcript of our minds. Elusiveness perhaps
best describes Ashberys poetry. His poems are difficult reading for those weaned in the
early 20th century poetry. Landscapes dominate Ashberys poems. His pictures are
always laid against the backdrops of vast landscapes, as the train is against the
photomural of the Alps in Melodic Trains. Ashbery often writes by assuming a persona
i.e. a character who narrates the story but who is distinctly not the poet. As a result we
have many different personalities talking to us in his poetry and none of them can be
confidently attributed to the poet himself. We have a good example of this in the traveler
in a tweed coat and holding a briar pipe in Melodic Trains who may be Ashbery but he is
soon lost in a multitude. By assuming this persona, Ashbery is able to bring in all the
social voices he needs to paint the landscape of experience in American society. Ashbery
substantiated this when he said. Poetry includes anything and everything. It is very
difficult to categorize either Ashbery himself or his poems. Though Ashbery is a 20 th
Century Post-modernist yet we find so much diversity in respect of his technique and
subject-matter that at one end, he seems classic like Elizabethans and at another, he
seems much like romanticists such as Wordsworth and Coleridge. But I think he is best
reserved for his avant-garde approach as asserted in the following lines from The
Painter:
How could he explain to them his prayer/ That nature, not art, might
usurp the canvas?
Another technique used by Ashbery is to echo other poets, to borrow their style, phrases
or images to establish a link or to draw an ironical relation between their and his point
of view. He has been known to echo Stevens, Eliot, Pound, and the Romantics. As David

Perkins points out in On Ashberys Predecessors for both Stevens and Ashbery the
imagination creates, destroys and immediately creates another vision of reality. We see
this in The Painter where the version of reality of the sea cannot be conveyed in paints
and the artist needs a different medium to do that while his concern is that nature and
not art might usurp the canvas. Sometimes Ashbery uses voices of other poets. David
Perkins points out he adopts or alludes to a style in order to invoke the tone of feeling
associated with it.he exhibits the modern colloquial voices of different types of
people. The Painter thus seems to be a direct echo from Brownings many poems on
the subject of art. We have echoes here of Fra Lippo Lippi when the protagonist was
criticized for finding his subjects in real life and was asked to make his portraits reflect
the soul and not the body. Ashberys subjects are not doings in the world but in the
mind. In Melodic Trains the journey exists in the poets mind and he mingles humour
with pathos, resignation with hope, and maintains his relaxed, and wonderfully
imaginative, speech despite premises that might have led to despair. The anguish of the
passengers of the train is shared by the poet but their anxiety and dogged impatience
lead the poet to say:
These figures leaving/The platform or waiting to board the train are
my brothers.
Ashberys poetry brings us to strange metaphors and shifts in descriptions. The clouds
of smoke in Melodic Trains are wearying and world weary and look like great white
apples. The tweed coat with its pattern is likened to date-coloured Sierras while the
lines of seams plunge into unfathomable Valleys. The figures may not always be this
difficult as the anxiety-laden passengers on the platform look like Tower of Pisa figures
though their dogged impatience makes them look like determined birds banking
forward into the wind. In The Painter, the artist chooses his wife as a subject and makes
her vast like ruined buildings. Music is another quality of Ashberys poetry. The
optimistic tone of his poetry makes even trains to be melodic. Melodic Trains describes
the anguish and anxiety of the journey in musical notes which end at a fanfare of
celebration with music of human voices and clapping and all that.
Finally, John Ashbery is a modern poet who addresses the sensibility of the modern
201st century contemporary man. Themes like music, rebellion, art, consciousness and
the habit of wrapping lines into paragraph-like stanza (which penetrate layer after layer
deeper into anxieties, doubts, and false beliefs) is a recent invention. He is a craftsman
like classicists and imaginative like romanticists and renowned for his simple colloquial
diction. His metaphors are sometimes highly metaphysical and his poetry has a natural
flow, varying in sound and effect according to the theme. All these make Ashbery a postmodern poet and establish him as a poet on sure foundations of contemporary American
poetry.