Review by Choice Review
This is an exhaustively researched, persuasive study of lines of influence often given short shrift in the vast, canonical scholarship on Ashbery. Hickman (Univ. of Kent, UK) demonstrates clearly the limitations of major US critics (Bloom, Perloff, Vendler) who stress the Pound-Williams-Stevens lineage. By eschewing the anxieties of influence, Hickman instead portrays Ashbery as a poet reading and using other poets, specifically, the metaphysical poets John Clare, Wordsworth, T. S. Eliot, and W. H. Auden. Hickman demonstrates the ways in which Ashbery's evasive, elliptical methods develop from these particularly English models. Though his discussion of Wordsworth and Ashbery's reaction to the Reagan years never quite persuades, the demonstration of Clare's non-narrative description as something that allows Ashbery to focus on "the history of the present" is excellent, as is his discussion of Auden's parataxis as the fundamental model for so much of Ashbery's own syntactic juxtaposition and image structuring. Perhaps most incisive is Hickman's observation that though both Eliot and Ashbery employ fragmentary poetics, they do so for vastly different purposes: Eliot to serve his external master narrative and Ashbery to allow fragmentation to become the only narrative of merit. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. M. Willhardt Monmouth College
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
