Other Traditions

Erscheinungsjahr 2025
ISBN: 978-0-674-30244-0
Verlag: Harvard University Press

Buch, Englisch, Band 61, 176 Seiten, Format (B × H): 142 mm x 211 mm, Gewicht: 340 g

Reihe: The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures

“An entertaining and shrewd little book … Ashbery is an accomplished raconteur.” —Charles Simic, New York Review of Books The 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 in some cases, all but forgotten today. More importantly for Ashbery, each wrote poetry that somehow defies the reader. Clare’s sometimes-monotonous naturalism, Roussel’s exhausting maze of parenthetical clauses, and Wheelwright’s eccentric Anglican mysticism do not invite casual reading. But under Ashbery’s tutelage, we experience the idiosyncratic brilliance of these “other traditions,” discovering how they shaped not only Ashbery’s poetics but also the broader trajectory of twentieth-century literature, from surrealism to New Criticism. With inimitable charm, wit, and erudition, the lectures collected in Other Traditions elevate the imperfect and peculiar, affirming the literary virtues of Ashbery’s difficult predecessors. The result is a revealing self-portrait of one of the giants of American poetry, if only through a convex mirror.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Ashbery, John

Weitere Mitwirkende

Burt, Stephanie

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literarische Strömungen & Epochen
• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Schreiben und Publizieren, Kreatives Schreiben
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft: Lyrik und Dichter

Über Autor(innen)

Burt, Stephanie
Stephanie Burt is the author of fourteen books of poetry and literary criticism, including <i>Super Gay Poems</i> and <i>Don’t Read Poetry.</i> A past judge for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, she served as a board member of the National Book Critics Circle, is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and writes regularly for the <i>New York Times Book Review,</i> the <i>New Yorker, London Review of Books,</i> the <i>New York Review of Books, Raritan,</i> and other publications. She is the Donald P. and Katherine B. Loker Professor of English at Harvard University.

Ashbery, John
John Ashbery (1927–2017) was the author of more than twenty books of poetry, including <i>Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,</i> which won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He received dozens of other awards and honors, including the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, the National Humanities Medal, and every major American poetry prize.