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 postwar American poet has been centrally concerned with questions of national identity and intercultural poetic exchange, by reading crucial episodes in Ashberys oeuvre in the context of an other tradition of modern English poets he himself has defined. This line runs from the editor of Ashberys 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 Ashberys aesthetic, and a significant remapping of postwar 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 AngloAmerican exchange as registered by each poet. The books presentation of the process of poetic influence is attentive to actual exchanges between contemporaries as evidenced in correspondence, as opposed to...

Binding: Hardcover;222 pages; Publisher: Oxford University Press; Classification: DSBH; Weight: 528 g; Dimensions: 148 x 267 x 19

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