Advocate to the Avant-Garde: Ashbery Leads American Poetry

Harvard's reputation as a breeding-ground for intellectuals has been boosted by the wealth of poets who have passed through the gates and left their legacy in the juvenilia published in the Advocate.

T.S. Eliot '04, e. e. cummings '15, James Laughlin '36, Robert Bly '50, Donald Hall '51, Frank O'Hara '50 and Harold Brodkey '51 and many other poets all either contributed or worked for the Advocate, then moved on to bigger and better things in the larger literary world outside the Square.

So, too, did John Ashbery '49, the man often called "the universal poet." He is sometimes referred to as "the Walt Whitman of our time" for his ability to find the sublime in the mundane and to transcend the personal to explain the shared sentiments of the nation.

His list of honors is long and distinguished by anyone's standards.

Ashbery received the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award for his 1975 book, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. He was the first English-language poet to win the Grand Prix de Biennales Internationales de Posie. He has also taken the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the MLA Common Wealth Award in Literature, the Frank O'Hara Prize, the Bollingen Prize, the English Speaking Union Prize, as well as many others.

The Fulbright, Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations have all provided Ashbery with fellowships, and the poet is currently the chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

Literary critic John Shoptaw, an instructor of literature at Yale University author of On the Outside Looking In: John Ashbery's Poetry (Harvard University Press, 1994), describes Ashbery as "the most intellectually exciting of many living poets."

Ashbery's career as a poet seems to have begun in earnest during his undergraduate years at Harvard.

Ashbery concentrated in English, and took at least one course in poetry one in creative writing, Shoptaw says.

He wrote his senior thesis on W. H. Auden, whom Ashbery met while an undergraduate when the British poet came to read at the University in March 1946.

Shoptaw, who has reviewed the thesis, describes it as "a funny piece of work, typed on about three typewriters, about 20 pages long--a pretty shoddy effort."

Upon graduating from the College, Ashbery applied to study English at Harvard's Graduate School of Education but was turned down.

Shoptaw says Ashbery's rejection from graduate school is an important lesson for students interesting in pursuing a career in the arts, and especially writers.

"People who are writers should know that you don't have to be successful or the best students," he says.

In fact, for an aspiring poet like Ashbery, Shoptaw says, the best aspect of college in terms of his education as a writer was the poet-friendly atmosphere. Ashbery seems to have benefited from friendships with many other young writers as well as from having at least one good outlet for publication, he says.

Ashbery published some work in the Advocate, one in a plethora of aspiring young writers whose names would later ring with household familiarity. The presence on campus of fellow undergraduates and now much-acclaimed poets Frank O'Hara and Kenneth Koch put Harvard at the "center of cultural poetic activity" in the late 1940's, Shoptaw says.

It was Koch and O'Hara who later urged Ashbery to move to New York City, the poets' mecca, where he currently resides.

Since graduating from the College, Ashbery has published 19 books of verse in addition to numerous individual poems.

Porter University Professor Helen H. Vendler describes Ashbery's work as "unrolling in long, beautiful loops of language, often as access to a luminated mind stocked with solemnity and absurdity alike, and incorporating the best of the experimental with the best of the traditional."

Despite his less-than-stellar senior thesis and rejection from the GSAS, Ashbery returned to Cambridge in 1989 as Norton Professor of Poetry, a position he retained for a year. The Norton professorship is one of the country's most prominent guest lectureships: Ashbery was following in the footsteps of such literary luminaries as Harold Bloom, Jorge Luis Borges, Umberto Eco, Robert Frost and Thornton Wilder, as well as fellow graduates like Eliot and cummings.

In 1990, Ashbery left Harvard to take on a post as a professor of languages and literature at Bard College, where he still teaches.

Wallace Stevens, who attended Harvard at the turn of the century, was also an important influence on Ashbery and Ashbery's writing, Shoptaw says.

Other writers instrumental in Ashbery's development as a poet were Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore. In the 1960s Ashbery called Moore, who also published in the Advocate, "the greatest living poet."

At that time, Shoptaw points out, Ezra Pound was still alive and writing, and Ashbery's comment reflects his rejection of what Shoptaw calls "the Pound tradition, the other poetic tradition of high modernism."

Shoptaw says Ashbery disliked that extremely modern "poetry with footnotes" or writing "that you had to bone up for."

In fact, Ashbery, whose writing career began post-World War II, was part of a trend towards non-representational art and music at the time, Shoptaw says. His poetry was unique in writing circles, however; contemporary poetry was largely "mired in describing ordinary experience, and especially ordinary suburban experience," Shoptaw says.

Shoptaw says Ashbery's signature writing style, a voice simultaneously private and accessible, has influenced much modern poetry.

"I think one of his chief contributions is writing poetry which is personal but not particular to his own life," he says. "Ashbery has a funny way of fusing particulars which might be anybody's life."

Ashbery's latest collection, Girls on the Run: A Poem (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999), epitomizes what Shoptaw calls "a move from the mature to premature."

"Ashbery's poetry now is getting younger and younger, wilder and wilder," he says. "It's positively adolescent."

Shoptaw says he intends this in an acclamatory way. The book, he says, "is a lot of fun. The best thing about it is that it has late poetry by the elder statesmen of poetry but it doesn't have that high seriousness. It's not pretentious. It's full of adventures, and you just never really know what's going to happen from one moment to the next."

This latest stylistic achievement of the septuagenarian Ashbery can in no way be identified as "autumnal," as a recent review in the Kirkus Review put it.

Rather, it is a fresh voice from a master of contemporary avant-garde poetry, who has capitalized on the current trend toward the acceptance of a broader definition of free-form verse.

Shoptaw says he is nonetheless a bit nostalgic for the Ashbery he was drawn to originally in the 1970's.

"I miss the sense of design that used to be there, the kind of actual strenuousness where he'd take up a kind of a problem and work up through it," he say. "It's as though he feels now he's done his work and can play."

But the critical consensus on his new book, at least, seems to suggest that his new direction is largely welcome.

Louisa Solano, owner of the Grolier Poetry Bookshop in Cambridge, where Ashbery gives frequent readings, prefers to simply let her actions speak for her feelings about the poet's work.

"I attend all of his readings," she says, smiling broadly.