The Desire to Communicate: Reconsidering John Ashbery and the Visual Arts

The present study springs from a genuine admiration for John Ashbery’s achievement. It aims at exposing those facets of Ashbery’s poetry which have been neglected by critical opinion, but which, paradoxically, were instrumental in winning the poet a leading position among the most innovative and daring American poets of today. This study reviews John Ashbery’s long-term professional engagement as a visual-art critic and researches conceptual developments and orientations in the visual arts, which have influenced the poet’s activity as a creative writer. Tracing analogies between the poetry of John Ashbery and the work of some of the enfants terribles of twentieth-century art – Marcel Duchamp and the Pop Artists, among others – opens new avenues of interpretation for an oeuvre which has often been considered difficult and solipsistic.