Some Further Thoughts on Poetry and Greatness.

The question of Ashbery’s greatness is not new; nor is it unprecedented that, when the fate of literary greatness is being decided, Ashbery is taken as a kind of case in point, for or against. But why is it always Ashbery? Orr presumes that this must be so, taking Ashbery as the obvious first and final reference point for his discussion. Yet when the fate of greatness is itself hanging the balance, as it is for Orr, Ashbery’s clearly should not go without saying. If we do not feel up to the task of assessing the extent of Ashbery’s achievement itself—and Orr clearly doesn’t—we should at least ask why it so often not merely Ashbery’s greatness but something like “greatness itself” that seems to be at stake in discussions of his merit. And why, conversely, Ashbery always comes up when the greatness of contemporary poetry generally is in question. For we are as likely to say that Ashbery is great because of the decline of greatness as we are to say that he is great despite it. Charles Altieri once called Ashbery, in a statement whose ambiguity encapsulates the spirit of Orr’s article, a “major poet in a minor age.” Does he mean that Ashbery is the single exception to the mediocrity of the age, or that the fact of his greatness in some way confirms it? Why didn’t he just say: “a major poet”?

As Eleanor rightly says, no matter how much we respect Ashbery it’s hard not to feel that his work will always shy from the terms we are accustomed to use for the likes of Milton and Wordsworth: “great,” or the even more fraught “genius.” It’s an uncomfortable fit, of which Ashbery himself gives us a nice image: “For the shoe pinches, even though it fits perfectly.” Ashbery can be elusive, oblique, aloof; he can also be offhand, casual, disarming. He avoids both the tragic and the epic; his poems end as diffidently as they begin, often concluding on what feels like an unresolved, even dissonant chord. He probably owes more to Auden and Bishop (whose influence can be felt in his work from the early ‘50s onward, well before her fame) than to the more canonical Stevens and Eliot; there are countless still less central poets whom Ashbery has cited as influences and written about persuasively. It should be noted that there’s something unmistakably academic in this, and I think Ashbery, like most contemporary authors, probably has more sympathy for the academy than is usually acknowledged: Ashbery’s Other Traditions, his six lectures on “minor” poets, were delivered at Harvard, and academics themselves, we should remember, are as willing to suspend their judgment and read thousands of wretched poems in the name of “objective” or “original” research as they are ready to condemn all but a select few to obscurity when it comes to deciding merit or putting together an anthology. Ashbery’s rare gift is to find what is beautiful and memorable in a poem an aspiring professor will forget as soon as he has finished typing the relevant bibliographic information into footnote 132.

But is “minor literature,” as Gilles Deleuze called it, are Ashbery’s “Other Traditions” simply the opposite of great literature? As I’ve suggested, Ashbery is equally famous for being difficult and for being casual; likewise his references no more lowbrow than they are canonical. The point is that our categories are not very good ones, that evading canonicity need not mean being populist or ecumenical. Kenneth Koch once asked Ashbery: “John, do you think we might be too concerned with matters of taste?” to which Ashbery said: “What else is there besides matters of taste?” Probably the notion of greatness would itself strike him as distasteful.

For all this, I don’t think it can be done away with. But what’s lacking in Orr’s article is above all a discussion of creativity and what it has to do with greatness. He suggests that greatness involves a return to some kind of vaguely classical loftiness without once mentioning that precisely the most canonical poets are those who we see as having transformed the tradition and the language itself in some fundamental way, even while encompassing it in its broadest scope and in its lived essence. Great literature does not merely transcend everyday language; rather it inhabits it in the fullest and most energetic way. And it’s precisely when it feels itself as lesser and enfeebled that it finds the strength and nobility to do so: from its beginnings in the Homeric epics, Western literature has been defined and driven by the notion of past greatness, and the use of vernacular Italian rather than Latin in Dante inaugurates a post-classical tradition which in each era achieves its greatness by finding, in a language and a culture that appear to be irremediably fallen, materials for renewal, discovery, and creation. What would Shakespeare, Wordsworth, and Joyce be without the full range of forms and idioms, poetic and colloquial alike, without the great variety of modes, from the comic to the tragic, which they drew upon in their work? Ashbery, I believe, very much belongs to this tradition. It is, after all, because rather than despite the decline of greatness that Ashbery achieves it: but this is the predicament of all poetry. We can certainly sit around arguing about whether or not he is as “great” as all those formidable predecessors, but it may be more valuable to observe that, as if by some kind of law, it’s only when it seems lost beyond all hope that greatness arises again from the ashes of the noble past, ashes which, for the most part, come before, not after, the fire.