"Nobody Was Ever Lonesome": The Lyric Vision of John Ashbery's "Litany"

Document Type

Article

Authors

Timothy DeJong, Baylor UniversityFollow

Author Biography

Tim DeJong is a senior lecturer in the English Department at Baylor University. He is the author of Hope and Aesthetic Utility in Modernist Literature (Routledge, 2020). His articles appear in venues such as Arizona Quarterly, Modernist Cultures, College Literature, and Research in African Literatures, among others. He has also published poems in Waxwing, Descant, Image, Rattle, Modern Language Studies, and other journals. For more, see timothydejong.com.

Abstract

John Ashbery has long been recognized as one of our most important and most challenging poets. His work continues to beguile readers but has also been regularly criticized as difficult and solipsistic. This essay proposes approaching Ashbery’s work through a lyric lens, reading his lyric mode as fundamentally rhetorical rather than mimetic. In doing so, we discover that poetic meaning itself is an abiding concern in Ashbery’s work—specifically, the nature and value of the process through which poems come to mean in the mind of the reader. To show how situating Ashbery’s work in this way opens up new reading possibilities, the main part of this essay analyzes his underdiscussed 1979 long poem “Litany,” which functions as an extended ars poetica, a poem that is primarily about poetic meaning, and one that, while it begins searchingly and confusingly, ends with a stirring defense of the value of lyric. The essay concludes by considering how the conception of lyric evidenced in “Litany” might offer a foothold into an ethic of lyric poetics founded on a radical openness to the distanced other—an openness in which the true appeal of Ashbery’s poetry lies.

Recommended Citation

DeJong, Timothy (2023) ""Nobody Was Ever Lonesome": The Lyric Vision of John Ashbery's "Litany"," Criticism: Vol. 65: Iss. 2, Article 1.
Available at: https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/criticism/vol65/iss2/1