The poet's mind used to make up stories: now it investigates the reasons why it is no longer able to do so. Consciousness picks its way in words through a meagre indeterminate area which it seems to try to render in exact terms. Most contemporary American poetry wants only to offer what Helen Vendler has called 'an interior state clarified in language'. 'Clarified' is an ambiguous word here, meaning the poetry's effort to achieve the effect of being clear on the page. In Ashbery's case the wordage trembles with a perpetual delicacy that suggests meaning without doing anything so banal as to seem to attempt it. Poetic syntax is constructed to express with a certain intensity a notion of the meaningful that does not convey meaning.

LRB 2 September 1982 | PDF Download