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.

This book features a collection of essays on some of the key poets of post-war America, written by leading scholars in the field. All the essays have been newly commissioned to take account of the diverse movements in American poetry since 1945, and also to reflect, retrospectively, on some of the major talents that have shaped its development. In the aftermath of the Second World War, American poets took stock of their own tumultuous past but faced the future with radically new artistic ideals and commitments. More than ever before, American poetry spoke with its own distinctive accents and declared its own dreams and desires. This is the era of confessionalism, beat poetry, protest poetry, and avant-garde postmodernism. This book explores the work of John Berryman, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Adrienne Rich, and Sylvia Plath, as well as contemporary African American poets and new poetic voices emerging in the 21st century. This New Casebook introduces the major American poets of the post-war generation, evaluates their achievements in the light of changing critical opinion, and offers lively, incisive readings of some of the most challenging and enthralling poetry of the modern era.

A study of how we should read one of America's most important poets. Ben Hickman argues that we must attend to Ashbery's radical conception of reading if we are to understand the originality of his writing. His study focuses on Ashbery's reading of English poets, including Andrew Marvell, John Donne, William Wordsworth, John Clare, T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden, and examines Ashbery's writing in terms of an 'aesthetic of inattention'. Hickman critiques the Americanisation of Ashbery's work as well as common assumptions about his Romanticism, his avant-garde Modernism and his engagement with the historical present. He demonstrates that Ashbery's generosity as a writer is closely tied to his generosity, inattention and situatedness as a reader.

John Ashbery and You approaches Ashbery’s critically neglected recent poetry with an ear to his use of the supremely elastic pronoun “you” and an eye toward his construction of his books as books. Together, these devices produce effects new to Ashbery’s oeuvre and offer readers new ways “in” to his work. John Ashbery and You argues that starting with April Galleons (1987), and reaching an apex in Your Name Here (2000), the poet has been paying increasingly keen and affectionate attention to his readers. Vincent tracks these techniques but above all offers his readers tools to reapproach a dauntingly difficult body of work. Some critics have suggested that Ashbery is producing books too quickly for criticism to keep up or that the later books represent, as Vincent summarizes it, “a kind of logorrhea . . . and therefore don’t really register as separate events as much as episodic eruptions of one big volcano which is the Later Ashbery.” Vincent contends that critics are not keeping up with Ashbery not so much because it is all of a piece, but rather because his work varies so much from volume to volume. Each of the volumes from the latter part of Ashbery’s career represents an individual and different poetic project, depending precisely on the unit of the book to produce its effects. By showing us that the entry point to Ashbery is not any given individual poem within a volume, but the entire volume, Vincent gives us a new and productive approach to reading the recent work of one of our most challenging poets.

In 1966, John Ashbery wrote: 'The English language is constantly trying to stave off invasion by the American language; it lives in a state of alert which is reflected to some degree in English poetry.' This book shows how the work of a major post-war American poet has been centrally concerned with questions of national identity and intercultural poetic exchange, by reading crucial episodes in Ashbery's oeuvre in the context of an 'other tradition' of modern English poets he himself has defined. This line runs from the editor of Ashbery's recent Collected Poems, Mark Ford, through Lee Harwood in the late 1960s, F. T. Prince in the 1950s, to 'chronologically the first and therefore most important influence' on his own work, W. H. Auden. Through detailed close readings of the poetry of Ashbery and these English poets, original interviews, and extensive archival research, a new account of Ashbery's aesthetic, and a significant re-mapping of post-war English poetry, is presented. The biographical slant of the book is highly significant, as it reads these writers' poetry and correspondence together for the first time, suggesting how major poetic innovations arose from specific social contexts, from the particulars of relations between poets, and also from a broader climate of Anglo-American exchange as registered by each poet. The book's presentation of the process of poetic influence is attentive to actual exchanges between contemporaries as evidenced in correspondence, as opposed to speculative relationships with dominant figures, and as such represents a departure from many other studies of Ashbery's work. Key themes include 'Englishness' as a national imaginary, the concept of the 'minor', reciprocal influence, and the poetry of coteries. The result is that both Ashbery himself, and the landscape of post-war English poetry, are presented in significantly new lights.

Bibliographical, biographical, and evaluative commentary of contemporary American poets who published since 1945.

Alphabetically arranged entries include discussions of individual authors, literary movements, institutions, notable texts, literary developments, themes, ethnic literatures, and "topic" essays.

The Electronic Poetry Center (EPC) of the State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo presents selections from "Tribe of John: Ashbery and Contemporary Poetry." The book highlights the poetry of American poet and writer John Ashbery (1927- ). EPC offers the text of the introduction and afterword, as well as the table of contents.