Thought and Poetry

Essays on Romanticism, Subjectivity, and Truth

John Koethe

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781350262461
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Aesthetics in Philosophy

Addressing objective and subjective views of the self and the world in philosophy and poetry, this collection brings together a chronology of John Koethe's thoughts on the connections between the two forms and makes a significant contribution to unsettling the oppositions that separate them. The essays traverse the philosophical conception of the self in modern poetry and locate connections between poets including William Wordsworth, Wallace Stevens, and John Ashbery alongside philosophers including Kant, Schopenhauer, and Wittgenstein. Koethe pays special attention to romantic poetry and notions of the sublime, which he maps onto subjective individual experience and the objective perspective on the natural world. Koethe further explores this theme in a new essay on romanticism and the sublime in relation to the mind-body problem. Using an associative and impressionistic style to write philosophically about poetry, Koethe defends his own approach that such writing cannot and should not aim for the rigor of philosophical argumentation.

1 The Metaphysical Subject of John Ashbery’s Poetry (1978)

A conception of the self can inform a poet’s work in a variety of ways. Perhaps the most familiar is through its possession of a distinctive “voice,” which basically amounts to a projection of a personality—either the poet’s actual personality or one he assumes. There can be as many voices as there are personalities, but it does not follow that differences between two poets’ voices reflect a difference in the conception of the self that informs their work. For example, Robert Lowell’s characteristic voice is quite different from John Berryman’s and the personalities their poems project are correspondingly different. But it strikes me that these distinctive personalities represent selves of essentially the same kind: they are personalities, that is, they are or are to be regarded as actual psychological egos as much a part of the real world as the historical circumstances, incidents, feelings, and relationships with which they become engaged. Poetry that is characterized primarily by its voice embodies, it seems to me, a psychological conception of the self: the self is a real entity among other real entities, maybe more important than most of them, but, like them, a part of the world it is trying to tell us about.

But poetry can also involve conceptions of the self not so directly tied to the poet’s own distinctive personality or voice. It can force us to consider the position of the “speaker”—or what I would prefer to call the “subject”—of the poetry with respect to the incidents, objects, thoughts, and personalities (including the poet’s own) it describes. And sometimes this position seems drastically different from the vantage point in the world that the poem presents and that is occupied by the psychological subject of the poem. In reading poetry informed primarily by the psychological notion of the self embodied in the poet’s voice, we are struck by questions like “How does he sound?” or “Whose voice is it?” (and a sense that the answers to these questions are indeterminate tells against the poetry). But for poetry involving a less psychological conception of the self or subject, the important question is not so much what the voice sounds like as where it comes from; and a mark of the success of this sort of poetry is that this question seems to have a determinate answer, even when we find ourselves unable to formulate it.

Remembrance of Things Past serves to illustrate the difference between the conceptions of a psychological ego and a nonpsychological subject. The character Marcel has a particular personality and lives in time and in tension between Swann’s way of domesticity and the Guermantes’ way of social circulation. And we can think of the novel as Marcel’s autobiography, whose theme is the fusing of the two ways over the course of time. But the vantage point of the narrator is an atemporal one from which the moments in his life do not succeed one another but coexist simultaneously. We are supposed to read the novel twice, the second time not as autobiography but as the narrator’s attempt to circumscribe the atemporal position Marcel comes to occupy at the end. Had someone other than Proust written a novel to this point, the personality of the protagonist and the incidents of his life would have been different: the psychological ego embodied in the work would not have been Marcel’s. Yet the subject of this hypothetical novel could have been the same: a different voice could have emanated from the same durationless position occupied by Proust’s narrator.

Now it seems to me that a distinctive quality of John Ashbery’s poetry, a source of much of its power, is that the conception of the self it embodies is not primarily a psychological one. I say not primarily psychological, because his work is possessed of an authentic individual voice, gently reticent, delighting equally in the abstract, the literal, and the silly, and usually heard through a haze of humor:

And so we to

Came where the others came: nights of physical endurance,

Or if, by day, our behavior was anarchically

Correct, at least by New Brutalism standards, all then

Grew taciturn by previous agreement. We were spirited

Away en bateau, under the cover of fudge dark.

It’s not the incomplete importunes, but the spookiness

Of the finished product.

(“Daffy Duck in Hollywood”)¹

This passage captures some of Ashbery’s characteristic “twang.” He does actually something like this in conversation, and one reason his imitators are usually unconvincing is that this tone, however cool and detached, works to project a genuine human voice and personality, in whose absence it seems (like any strong poet’s style in someone else’s mouth) willed, mannered, and depersonalized.

But even though Ashbery’s work embodies the presence of a particular psychological ego, it is almost unique in the degree to which it is informed by a nonpsychological conception of the self or subject: a unitary consciousness from which his voice originates, positioned outside the temporal flux of thought and experience his poetry manages to monitor and record (almost unique in this respect: I sometimes feel something similar to be true of Elizabeth Bishop’s work, though—and this is part of the point—her voice is decidedly different from his). The sense of the presence of a unified subject that conceives these poems is very strong, almost palpable. Among the stylistic indications that this subject is not a particular personality are Ashbery’s characteristic use of pronouns: it seems a matter of indifference whether the subject is referred to as “I,” “you,” “he,” “she,” “it,” or “we,”² shifts between which often occur rapidly within the course of the same poem:

SHE

But now always from your plaint I

Relive, revive, springing up careless,

Dust geyser in city absentmindedness,

And all day it is writ and said:

We round women like corners. They are the friends

We were always saying goodbye to and then

Bumping into the next day. School has closed

Its doors on a few. Saddened, she rose up

And untwined the gears of that blank, blossoming day,

“So much for Paris, and the living in this world.”

But I was going to say

It differently, about the way

Time is sorting us all out, keeping you and her

Together yet apart, in a give-and-take, push-pull

Kind of environment. And then, packed like sardines,

Our wit arises, survives automatically. We imbibe it.

This from “Fantasia on ‘The Nut-Brown Maid,’ ”³ a long poem written in the form of a dialogue between HE and SHE, two identities that are not really differentiated by the poem at all. The references of HE and SHE, the pronouns within the previous passage, and Ashbery’s pronouns generally, are anaphoric. But these references are never given in the poem: they seem to belong to a world outside it, and there is a strong sense that any distinctions between them would be basically arbitrary.

“Time is sorting us all out.” Another stylistic clue to the nature of Ashbery’s subject is the pervasive sense of temporal dislocation that characterizes his work: the grammatical past tense is often used to indicate the present of the poem, even when the present is the moment of writing itself (as David Kalstone has observed, “Tense will shift while the poem refers to itself as part of the past”).⁴ Another passage from “Fantasia” both illustrates and offhandedly tries to explain this tendency:

HE

To him, the holiday-making crowds were

Energies of a parallel disaster, the fulfilling

Of all prophecies between now and the day of

Judgment. Spiraling like fish.

Toward a distant, unperceived surface, was all

The reflection there was. Somewhere it had its opaque

Momentary existence.

But if each act

Is reflexive, concerned with itself on another level

As well as with us, the strangers who live here,

Can one advance one step further without sinking equally

Far back into the past? There was always something to see,

Something going on, for the historical past owed it

To itself, our historical present. Another month a huge

Used-car sale on the lawn shredded the sense of much

Of the sun coming through the wires, or a cape

Would be rounded by a slim white sail almost

Invisible in the specific design, or children would come

Clattering down fire escapes until the margin

Exploded into an ear of sky. Today the hospitals

Are light, airy places, tented clouds, and the weeping

In corridors is like autumn showers. It’s beginning.

Time’s job of “sorting us all out” is always in progress but never gets completed, for the subject cannot “advance one step further without sinking equally / Far back into the past.” Ashbery’s subject seems possessed by an impulse, which it knows has to be frustrated, to reify itself, to find or create some thing with which it can identify totally:

I shall use my anger to build a bridge like that

Of Avignon, on which people may dance for the feeling

Of dancing on a bridge. I shall at last see my complete face

Reflected not in the water but in the worn stone floor of my

bridge.

(“Wet Casements”)⁵

“I shall at last see”—the tone is wistful and resigned. The attempt at reification yields only a personality or image that is “other,” “A portrait, smooth as glass … built up out of multiple corrections / [which] has no relation to the space or time in which it was lived” (“Definition of Blue”).⁶ The subject inhabits “the sigh of our present” (“Blue Sonat...