The question of character : John Ashbery's late lyrics

Abstract

John Ashbery’s work is vast and has an immense following. Yet critical work tends to circle his pervasive obscurity and enigmatic ambiguity to such a degree that his poems are frequently recognized as off-putting to his readers. This thesis takes up the challenge of studying Ashbery's renowned complexity closely by looking through the lens of his late poems and the question of character.

Given Ashbery’s own age and volume of work, the late poems irrupt into a major period of social change, the age of social media: an era following the “information era” and one that has been flagged, in the contemporary period, as a “conversation age.” Indeed, Ashbery’s late poems are discursively and centrally rooted in auditory acts of “conversation,” forging a unique fusion of narrative and lyric strategies that has yet to be explored at length in critical studies.

This study will focus on selected discursive strategies of auditory patterning, multivocalism, and especially a lyric production of “character” in Ashbery’s late poems, casting a new light on what may constitute “voice” or identity in contemporary lyric and social contexts. Thus, the thesis will explore unexpected and discursive lyric strategies of “conversation” or conversational discourse. Three main bands of conversational discourse, which also speak to an inseparability of the work with its times, are the following: the McGuffin and anecdote, collage and lyric voicing. Understanding the reciprocity between Ashbery’s contemporary lyric practices in his late work and a new era of social mobility offers new insights into the question of character and the responsibilities that language and voice may carry in the twenty-first century.