Other Traditions

An entertaining and shrewd little book ... Ashbery is an accomplished raconteur. -Charles Simic, New York Review of BooksThe most influential American poet of his generation appraises the lesser-known writers who shaped his own confounding, infinitely inventive work.John Ashbery was the quintessential difficult poet. When asked to explain his work, he typically responded by insisting that his poetry was its own explanation. Fittingly, then, when he was invited to deliver the Norton Lectures at Harvard in 1989, Ashbery declined to spell out what he put on the page. Instead, he offered rapt audiences a tour of his influences, the authors he turned to as a jumpstart for times when the batteries have run down. The poets in Ashbery's personal canon-John Clare, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Raymond Roussel, John Wheelwright, Laura Riding, and David Schubert-were all tragic figures in their own way, plagued by mental illness or poverty, ridiculed or barely recognized in their own lives, and...

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