The anxiety of influencers
Why read John Ashbery?
Literary greatness, poetic immortality, influence, tradition: these terms seem almost laughably quaint, and the high summer of literary theory feels as far away as Prohibition. Worse, such phrases have been corrupted by contemporary resonance. Literary greatness has given way to American Greatness, poetic immortality to biohacking for longevity. Influence is now the province of Instagram, and tradition belongs to the right. So what to make of the authors and poets whose greatness and influence was once inescapable, whose immortality in the tradition once seemed assured?
David Schurman Wallace ventures some answers in his brilliant 2021 essay “Dead Poet Anxiety,” which takes a posthumous volume of John Ashbery’s poetry as its occasion. In Schurman Wallace’s rendering, Ashbery — who died in 2017, and whose late-modernist poetics won him awards like the Pulitzer Prize and the rhapsodic praise of canon-forming critics like Harold Bloom and Helen Vendler — is “a writer likely too elusive to inspire passions today.” Still, Schurman Wallace shows how Ashbery’s sprawling tapestries of near-synesthetic language anticipated the kaleidoscope of the feed — while remaining distinct from the identity-driven, short-form poetry that succeeds on social media.
Schurman Wallace’s essay isn’t just a helpfully comprehensive look back at a fading star. It’s an astute — and entertaining — analysis of the major currents in poetry today, and the aesthetics of online culture. (I’ll think about modernism, and the internet, differently after reading about “the chronic meme-ability of William Carlos Williams’s ‘This Is Just to Say,’ tortured in its too-transmissible afterlife.”) I encountered this essay soon before I joined the staff of The Drift, and it’s remained for me something of a standard for what our criticism can achieve by leveraging the closest of close reading to think through some of the biggest questions of how culture is changing.
Max Norman
Associate Editor, The Drift
Dead Poet Anxiety | John Ashbery in the Age of Social Media
DAVID SCHURMAN WALLACE
Ashbery’s poetics is an internet poetics avant la lettre, invoking the absolute connectivity we wish its connections offered, but rarely have in practice.
