John Ashbery and the Poetics of the Art World

You're probably feeling something like despair if you know you can't make it to the University of Louisville for the 1:00 pm session of the The Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture Since 1900 (Humanities room 111).  You'll miss Andrew Epstein talking about Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground and their relationship to the New York poetry scene of their day, and you'll miss John Gallaher talking about Michael Benedikt as a nexus figure of the New York School.  You'll also miss me giving a paper called "John Ashbery and the Poetics of the Art World," but don't fret about that. The text—minus any tweaking it may receive as I sit among the nervous grad students in the lobby of the Brown Hotel or among the Gnostic poets at the Mayan Cafe, where they hang out and summon mystic wisdom over bourbon and tamales—is here:

John Ashbery and the Poetics of the Art World 

 …I had to find a way out of the woods.
Now, in some cases, this is easy—you just walk straight along a road and pretty soon
you're out of the woods and there are suburban backlots. In my case,
though, it wasn't that simple, though it wasn't extraordinarily demanding either—I
just lay down in a boat and slept, Lady-of-Shalott style. Soon I was gliding among you
taking notes on your conversations and otherwise making a pest of myself. 
I pretended to be angry when onlookers jeered and cows mooed and even the heralds told me to shut up, 
yet at bottom I was indifferent. I knew my oracles
for what they were—right about 50% of the time—and I also knew their accuracy wasn't 
an issue.

 In these lines, from John Ashbery's Flow Chart, the poet presents himself as Tennyson's Lady of Shalott—and the comparison is apt. Consider the plot of Tennyson's poem. The lady is confined to her tower, isolated from the thriving world of business and love beyond the walls. She weaves a tapestry of what she sees, and in so doing becomes a symbol for many things. Firstly, she is a woman in a world profoundly masculine in its institutions and structures of power. Moreover, she is a laborer in a time when labor conditions—particularly in textiles—are becoming more and more rationalized and alienating. Finally, as a tapestry weaver she is a figure for the artist. All of these things, Tennyson implies, are alienated, confined, set off from the world where barges ply their trade on the river and young lovers meet to wed. We can think of Tennyson’s poem almost as an allegory of John Ashbery's situation, in that three kinds of alienation—having to do with his sexuality, his relation to conventionally productive labor, and his status as a certain kind of poet in midcentury America—led him to a peripatetic life and what me might call a poetics of wandering or drift.

If you want to think about Ashbery and queerness, John Shoptaw, in On the Outside Looking Out has done a better job of it than I could ever do. If you want to think about Ashbery and alienation from labor, read his poem “The Instruction Manual” and write the article about that poem that still needs to be written. If you want to hear about Ashbery and the importance of the art world he entered as a young man in New York at the end of the 1940s, I hope I can help. 

Drawn into the orbit of precocious literary friends at Harvard, John Ashbery joined an artistic milieu in New York City that was intensely aestheticist and that emphasized the autonomy of the art object and the primacy of the medium itself. Ashbery's poetry, too, has been, non-dogmatic and intensely concerned with the medium of language. His particular form of aesthetic expression involves aleatory techniques and linguistic disruptions, and, especially, a kind of narrative drift. Characteristically, his form of narrative, or pseudo-narrative, drifts and observes, and Ashbery does not expect his oracles to change the world: the poetry that comes from them will exist for itself, not—as in the hopes of modernist greats like Yeats, Pound, or Eliot—for the renovation of the culture. Unlike those poets, Ashbery is as pure an aesthete as any poet of the 1890s. This is not to say that he cannot be read politically—he has been, and has welcomed it—but the characteristic qualities of his work stem from early formative experiences in a very particular moment of the New York art world of the late 40s and early 50s, a moment perhaps more extreme in its commitment to aesthetic autonomy than any other in the American 20th century. 

The New York to which Ashbery moved in 1949, when he began his graduate studies at Columbia, was the epicenter of America's visual art scene, but it is easy, given the later lionization of the abstract expressionists, to misremember the situation of American art in 1949. The art world then was small and isolated. When John Bernard Myers, a founder of the Tibor de Nagy gallery, was putting together artists for his early shows, he found the art world tiny indeed: "it should be stressed that… almost everyone knew everyone else" and "all of them lived in Manhattan." The possibility of connecting with the world beyond the art scene, let alone influencing it, seemed extremely remote: during her 1947 visit to New York Simone de Beauvoir came to the conclusion that "there is no informed public" for the arts—hyperbole, to be sure, but a good indicator of how America in the late 40s appeared from a European intellectual's position. And native intellectuals tended to concur, even in the use of hyperbole.

The alienation that permeated the art world did not manifest in political radicalism, but rather in an emphasis on the isolated artist's authenticity, and on the autonomy of the work of art. This was, after all, the era of The God That Failed, with its documentation of the left's painful disillusionment with Communism, as well as the time of the blacklist and the general suppression of the American left. Even the once-radical Partisan Review crowd had largely retreated from politics by 1947, and, having abandoned first Stalin, then Trotsky, they now bent their knees to art. The depoliticization left many artists adrift, a condition Robert Motherwell expressed in in 1944 when he said "The artist's problem is with what to identify himself…. Hence the tendency of modern painters to paint for each other."

The preservation of individual authenticity and autonomy, rather than any movement on behalf of class or faction, was the artist's mode of opposition—and the means of opposition was the autonomy of the work of art. As Thomas B. Hess put it in ARTnews, “There was nothing to do but paint. The self-directed community became self-oriented. Art replaced revolution in its eschatology…. Never before in painting had art itself so preoccupied the artist.” Ad Reinhardt was more extreme in his formulations than most, but he was not out of step with the general temper of the art world when he declared that art "should have no connection with anything, not God, Morals, Politics, Movements, Aesthetics, Philosophy, Science." Even that soberest of academic art critics, Meyer Shapiro, declared that the artist must now "cultivate his own garden."

But poets came to the garden of the postwar art world, too: a phenomenon, we may be surprised to note, unprecedented in American history. John Ashbery offers two statements about what that felt like in 1949:

I hadn't realized it, but my arrival in New York coincided with the cresting of the 'heroic' period of Abstract Expressionism, as it was later to be known, and somehow we all seemed to benefit from this strong moment… We were in awe of de Kooning, Pollock, Rothko and Motherwell and not too sure of exactly what they were doing. But there were other things to attend to: concerts of John Cage's music, Merce Cunningham's dances, the Living Theatre, but also talking and going to the movies and getting ripped and hanging out and then discussing it all over the phone.

And

This is not the place to wonder why the poets Koch, O'Hara, Schuyler, Guest and myself gravitated toward painters, probably it was merely because the particular painters we knew happened to be more fun than the poets… 

If we look beyond the flippant assertion that the poets entered the world of the painters because the painters had more fun, we will not only find a more substantial explanation for the melding of the poetic and artistic scenes—we will also understand more about how the poets "seemed to benefit" from the fervent experimentalism of the art world.

The first thing to acknowledge is that in the years after the war it was by no means an obvious thing that poets should become involved in the world of art. Although there had been exceptions, like Wallace Stevens, who frequented artist's studios and studded his prose with references to painting, the French-style alliance of poets and painters was rare in early 20th century America. As Dore Ashton puts it in her seminal study of the New York School painters, The New York School: A Cultural Reckoning, "One of the peculiar aspects of traditional American culture had been the total isolation of the different arts. American artists noted early in the century that, unlike artists on the Continent, they had no literary companions." This only began to change after the war, when "well-developed suspicion on both sides" faded, and there were "attempts to bring about a rapprochement."

These attempts were certainly successful, if we are to judge by the reception Ashbery and his peers received among the artists and, even more importantly, the gallerists. Indeed, it is in part through the schemes of gallerists operating in difficult commercial circumstances that the rapprochement of different creative worlds in postwar New York came about.

New American art, in the postwar years, did not generally find patrons among the upper class, but among a small part of the professional middle class, and among other artists. Sensing an opportunity to expand the market beyond visual artists, Myers intuited that "more interaction among all the arts might speed us on our way." At a time when there was no off-Broadway theater as we know it in New York, Myers learned from a friend of Parisian theater in which plays by poets were given sets by contemporary artists and featured music by avant-garde composers. So Myers worked with Frank O'Hara, James Merrill, and others to found the Artists' Theater in 1953. Soon, poets, composers, and visual artists were working together on a variety of productions—including John Ashbery's play The Heroes, with sets by the artist Nellie Blaine. The Artists' Theater, and projects like it, became the crucible in which was forged a multi-arts creative scene, an audience composed of people concerned with, or practicing, different arts, and a culture of collaboration. Born of a desire to survive the indifference of the general public, such a scene, centered on aesthetics and artistic production for artistic producers, was a far cry from the political movements in which artists of the 1930s tended to come together and collaborate. It was a scene in which Theseus, in Ashbery's play, could deliver the line "I now possessed the only weapon with which the Minotaur might be vanquished—the indifference of the true aesthete" and have it received by an audience with approving laughter.

One way to think about the presence of the poets in the postwar art world is to see it as the natural path for experimentally-minded poets, given the aesthetic ferment of American painting and the relative conservatism of American poetry under the rising sign of the New Criticism. But to see the experiment-oriented art world as a draw for experiment-oriented young poets is to see only one part of a dialectical process: it is just as true to say that the art world encouraged and emboldened the poets who entered it to become more experimental. The poems Ashbery wrote at Harvard are not terribly outré by the literary standards of the time. But much of the work he wrote in postwar New York went much further afield.

The sociologist Howard S. Becker notes that "art works always bear the marks of the system which distributes them," and that and poets depend on the audiences reached by their publishers for "shared traditions" and "background against which their work makes sense." When we consider where much of Ashbery's early writing was being published, and to whom it was being distributed, we see that it was going to a sharply defined audience, one rooted in the art world and accustomed to a degree of abstraction and experiment alien to the literary establishment of the times—to sensibilites more attuned to Willem de Kooning than to de Kooning's literary contemporary Cleanth Brooks. Much of Ashbery’s early writing appeared in Semicolon, a journal published by art curators and distributed at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, the Artists' Club, and the Cedar Bar—all art world institutions. Moreover, the small collections of poems that precede and follow Yale's publication of Some Trees are both art world productions: 1953's Turandot, with four drawings by Jane Freilicher, was published by Tibor de Nagy gallery in 1953; and The Poems, with silk screen work by Joan Mitchell, published in 1960 by Tiber Press (a publisher of the visual arts). It should come as no surprise that Ashbery came to see the poetry of the literary establishment as too conservative: he and his early audience were immersed in a milieu that accepted and encouraged experimentalism far more than did the established literary institutions of the time.

Within this restricted sphere of reception, there was an even smaller sphere: the little coterie of the poets themselves, a hyper-aesthetic demimonde within the New York aesthetic demimonde. As James Schuyler put it, "John and Frank and I were almost like a mutual admiration society," affirming and enabling one another. Glossing Schuyler's comment, David Lehman underlines the sense of a small world removed from both the literary establishment and the general reading public: "since acceptance or rejection of [their] works was an indication of neither success nor failure, the poets looked to themselves as ultimate arbiters." Tennyson's friends rejected poems like “The Lady of Shalott” and urged him to be a moralist for the broad reading public—the poet of “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” the laureate; Ashbery's were satisfied if he delighted them and them alone.

The situation reminds one of a remark made by Pierre Bourdieu in his examination of the rise of autonomous art. In the absence of pressures to conform to religious, political, or market forces, or to otherwise conform to the norms of a public, artists find themselves "in a position to rebuff every external constraint or demand, are able to affirm their mastery over that which defines them and which properly belongs to them, that is, the form." If we understand this, we understand Ashbery.

T.S. Eliot Graduates from Aestheticism

I’ve been doing some research on T.S. Eliot’s brief journey through aestheticism on his way to becoming a religious poet and a moralist with a reactionary critique of modernity—and I can’t think of any clearer demonstration of the change in his poetry than the contrast between one of his most famous Christian poems, “Journey of the Magi,” and a very early untitled poem, known in Eliot circles as “At Graduation 1905.”

Eliot wrote the latter poem, an ode, when he was 16 years old, and read it at his graduation from Smith Academy.  His greatest literary influence at the time was Edward Fitzgerald’s famous translation of an 11^th century Persian work, The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám.  Fitzgerald’s rather free translation had attracted a cult following in certain English literary circles ever since it appeared in 1859, and had gone through several expansions and editions over the course of the late nineteenth century.  It was particularly popular in Pre-Raphaelite circles, and later among the aesthetes of the Rhymer’s Club in the 1890s.  One can see why: it was a kind of antidote to the moralistic poetry of such Victorian heavyweights as Tennyson and Matthew Arnold.  Here’s a fairly typical stanza, in which we are urged to see the world as temporary, as without any great moral meaning:

The Worldy Hope men set their Hearts upon 

Turn Ashes—or it prospers; and anon, 

Like Snow upon the Desert’s dusty Face, 

Lighting a little hour or two—is gone.

“The Charge of the Light Brigade” it ain’t.  Instead of duty to Queen, country, and God, we find a world almost existentially absurd, a world in which the momentary fleeting impression of beauty is what matters.  Bohemians like Dante Gabriel Rossetti loved Fitzgerald’s Rubáiyát, and it anticipates both Pater’s aestheticism and the whole emphasis on a poetry of fleeting impressions, loaded with imagery of transience, that we get with Oscar Wilde, Ernest Dowson, and other 1890s types.

Fitzgerald certainly came as a relief to the young T.S. Eliot, who had grown up in an oppressively strict and moralistic family milieu.  When I read his recollections of encountering the Rubáiyát, I thought immediately of John Stuart Mill’s recollections of first encountering Wordsworth and the “culture of the feelings” after his narrow, Utilitarian upbringing.  Here’s Eliot:

I can recall clearly enough the moment when, at the age of fourteen or so, I happened to pick up a copy of Fitzgerald’s Omar which was lying about, and the almost overwhelming introduction to a new world of feeling which this poem was the occasion of giving me.  It was like a sudden conversion; the world appeared anew, painted with bright, delicious, and painful colors.  Thereupon I took the usual adolescent course with Byron, Shelley, Keats, Rossetti, Swinburne. 

There’s reason to wonder just how Eliot found a copy “lying about,” since he grew up in a household where even Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn were banned, and the Rubáiyát is both agnostic and (on occasion) just a bit racy.  But I digress.

Here’s a representative stanza of Eliot’s graduation ode.  The influence of Fitzgerald’s agnostic, aesthetic ethos is clear enough:

We go; like flitting faces in a dream;

Out of thy care and tutelage we pass

Into the unknown world—class after class,

O queen of schools—a momentary gleam,

A bubble on the surface of the stream

A drop of dew upon the morning grass.

“Graduation addresses,” says Eliot biographer James E. Miller Jr., “are generally supposed to be inspirational, saying, in effect: now go forth and live a life of great achievement and fulfillment.  Eliot, therefore, must has startled his listeners.”  Indeed!  This is a poem without moral exhortation, without homiletic reassurances.  This is a poem in which fleeting moments of beauty are the best for which we can hope—an aesthete’s poem.

Two stanzas from the poem offer an early version of one of Eliot’s recurring motifs: the return to a place long left behind, and the difference felt by those returning (the most famous instance is in “Little Gidding,” where Eliot writes “We shall not cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time”).  Notice the alienation felt by those who return to Smith Academy after graduation:

Standing upon the shore of all we know

We linger for a moment doubtfully

Then with a song upon our lips, sail we

Across the harbor bar—no chart to show,

No light to warn of rocks which lie below,

But let us put forth courageously

As colonists embarking on the strand

To seek their fortunes on some foreign shore

Well know they lose what time shall not restore

And when they leave they fully understand

That though again they see their fatherland

They there shall be as citizens no more.

We don’t get much by way of an explanation for this alienation—and this itself is significant.  Eliot, at 16, gives us a sense of separateness without any specific moral attached to it.  Those who return are no longer at home in the place they’ve left, but we’re not given any moral to attach to this story.  It’s not that the world has corrupted them, and they must touch base with the virtues embodied in the old school.  Nor is it that they’ve become Real Men, who must put aside childish things and get back out into the jungle where they compete with one another to push back the frontiers of darkness and spread the light of empire.  What we have is a mood, without a moral: the very stuff of impressionism and aestheticism.

Flash forward to 1927, and we find Eliot touching on his ‘return’ motif, but quite differently.  Eliot was now 39 years old, had settled in England, and had just been baptized and confirmed in the Anglican Church.  It was a move that rattled his deeply Unitarian family back in the U.S., and that puzzled his English friends, who tended to be secular intellectuals.  When Eliot went to visit I.A. Richards at Cambridge, for example, Richards and his friends were surprised to find Eliot carrying a “large, new, and to us awe-inspiring Prayer Book,” and were a bit flummoxed by the demands of Eliot’s faith, being “suddenly made much aware of our total inability to advise him on (or even discuss) the character of the various Services available on Sunday mornings.”

This was a new Eliot, and one of the poems that he published in 1927, “Journey of the Magi,” captures both his sincere Christian commitment and his sense of alienation.  After recounting the travails of the magi on their way to the nativity, and loading the poem up with imagery foreshadowing the crucifixion, the poem concludes with the return of one of the magi to the kingdom he’d left behind:

All this was a long time ago, I remember,

And I would do it again, but set down

This set down

This: were we led all that way for

Birth or Death?  There was a Birth, certainly,

We had evidence and no doubt.  I had seen birth and death,

But had thought they were different; this Birth was

Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.

We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,

But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,

With an alien people clutching their gods.

I should be glad of another death.

This is the first point in the poem where we’re made aware of the speaker’s silent interlocutor, a scribe figure to whom he dictates his accounts.  And of course, since the accounts we have of the journey of the magi are scriptural and without any mention of the magi's return, there’s a suggestion that the speaker’s words, which he twice insists be recorded, have not been recorded— that they've been suppressed by someone who did not want such discouraging comments to be put in front of the faithful.  And the comments are discouraging, telling us of the pain of conversion, of how one’s rebirth as a Christian is also a death of one’s former self.  The nature of the pain is significant: it comes in the form of alienation from one’s people.  One returns, as one does in Eliot’s graduation ode, to find that one no longer belongs.  Unlike in the graduation ode, though, there’s a specific moral to the story: though conversion is difficult, and though it leads to a rift with those one loves (we may think here of Eliot’s shocked family, or of his puzzled friends at Cambridge), conversion is not to be reversed.  The speaker suffers from his sense of difference, but it’s important that he never raises the possibility of re-conversion: he’d rather have “another death”—a literal one— than that. 

Set side by side with the graduation ode, “Journey of the Magi” looks very much like a moralist’s poem.  Its ethos is one of religion, and poetry at the service of religion, rather than aestheticism, and the appreciation of the passing moment as the highest of goods.  If Eliot’s graduation ode was a poem of moments, “Journey of the Magi” aspires to be a poem of the intersection of the timeless with time.

Poetry and the Market: John Keats' Moment of Doubt

So, as part of my ongoing process of poking away at the project whose working title remains "The Big Boring Book of Aesthetics, or: How Poetics got to Now from Then," I've been rooting around in Keats' letters. It's been a while since I've read them, and it's good to meet them again. You get to see Keats pine for love, recover from a black eye he got in a game of cricket, you get to watch him hang with Coleridge and talk nightingales, nightmares, and poetics, and, most importantly, you get to confirm your sense of Keats as the ultimate aesthete — most of the time.

Poetry, for Keats, was about poetry — a radical position at the time. It wasn't about anything like a quest for truth (his famous idea of negative capability meant we needn't seek after certainties), and it certainly wasn't about persuading anybody of anything ("we hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us," he writes, a line I think of whenever I find myself at some kind of "poets for social justice" event). Beauty must not only reign as the supreme value, for Keats: it must "obliterate all consideration" of other things.

Keats has a tremendously strong sense of the autonomy of the imaginative act: if you're a real Keatsian, you don't write with a goal in mind (not, say "this poem will convince them that the war is bad," nor "I must complete a full-length manuscript that'll win the Picayune Press Emerging Writers Award," still less "I need something they'll publish at the kind of journal the tenure committee cares about" nor even "this'll show her I'm sensitive and then she'll want to meet for clove cigarettes and some snogging"). If you're a real Keatsian, you surrender to the imagination's own imperatives. "If Poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves of a tree," says Keats, "it had better not come at all."

The most challenging part of this, for a lot of people, is the lack of a sense of ethics, the failure to worry about whether one is writing something morally acceptable or not ("what shocks the virtuous philosopher delights the cameleon poet"). But the ethical content of a poem isn't a problem for Keats, because he believed, like Philip Sidney before him, that the poet affirmed no particular truth; and he believed, like Auden after him, that poetry made nothing happen. It simply existed, as beauty.

It wasn't a position shared by all the Romantics. In one letter, you can catch Keats chiding Shelley for being too political in "The Cenci," saying "you might curb your magnanimity and be more of an artist" — and this when Shelley was scratching up some cash to haul Keats' tubercular ass down to Italy, lest he die of an English winter. Keats was an aesthete, but that didn't mean he wasn't aggressive.

So: no surprises here about Keats and aestheticism, at least not yet. But there is one moment in the letters when we see, ever so briefly, young Mr. Keats' faith in aesthetic purity and the autonomous imagination shaken. For a brief moment, we can watch that growing force of the nineteenth century, the logic of the marketplace, put the fear into Keats. Is poetry, he wonders, nothing more than a commodity? Check it out:

(From a letter to Benjamin Bailey, March 13, 1818, for those keeping score at home)

I am sometimes so very sceptical as to think Poetry itself a mere Jack a lantern to amuse whoever may be struck by its brilliance — as Tradesmen say every thing is worth what it will fetch, so probably every mental pursuit takes its reality and worth from the ardor of the pursuer — being in itself a nothing...

Look out! Tradesmen are trudging across the well-kept lawns of poesy, their hobnailed boots mucking up the flowerbeds! What's poetry worth? What's it for? Is it just a low-returning venture in the entertainment industry? One hears echoes of the Utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham's dictum that pushpin (a pub game worth trying) is as good as poetry, when it comes to having a good time. All that was solid in Keats' aestheticism melts into air, and the poem is "in itself a nothing," just a blank slate onto which the market will inscribe a (no doubt deeply-discounted) price.

But even as the abyss of market-value opens before Keats, we see him shifting things around, and finding a way to value poetry other than by market appeal. When he speaks of the work taking its value from "the ardor of the pursuer" he opens a door to a different set of values than those of the market. After all, the market isn't about the individual's degree of passion for something: it's about big groups, and tipping their passion just to the point where they'll buy. When Keats shifts the ground of value from a poem being "worth what it will fetch" in the market to the degree of ardor a poem can incite in a single reader, he changes the rules. Suddenly, the poem's value isn't something you can put on a price-tag. Rather, the value is determined by how much any one person can love the poem. Poetry, it seems, doesn't need a big demographic appeal — the poet can settle for what Milton called "fit audience though few." If, to cite that doyen of aesthetes, Walter Pater, the poem can make a few people burn with the light of a hard, gem-like flame, then it has value, no matter what the broader market may feel.

I'm pretty sure that the little mental-judo move Keats comes up with to escape his moment of doubt is one still in use today. In fact, I remember invoking something similar when I was arguing for the importance of the great, and greatly unpopular, poet John Peck: "I don't foresee a world in which Peck's readers outnumber those of the laureate who sings the praises of television," I wrote, "but for a small number of readers Peck will always matter tremendously. Be one of them." I didn't know I was being Keatsian.

***

In other news, John Gallaher has written "Robert Archambeau: We're Still Shopping at the Romanticism Store," an intriguing response up to my earlier post "Poetry/Not Poetry."

Art and Life from Aestheticism to Langpo

So check it out: Kelly Comfort, an amazing polymath who knows about Latin American modernism, Cuban writing, and German literature, has cooked up a collection of essays called Art and Life in Aestheticism: De-Humanizing and Re-Humanizing Art, the Artist, and the Aesthetic Receptor. The second part of the title may be a bit of a mouthfull, but it does its job, giving as it does a shout-out to José Ortega y Gasset's 1925 treatise The Dehumanization of Art, which examined with a skeptical (but not a dismissive) eye the emerging emphasis on formalism in the art of the twentieth century. The essays in Kelly's book tackle ideas of formalism and the aesthetic as they intersect with, or eschew, lived experience, the social, and the political. The emphasis of the book is on the aesthetic movement of the late nineteenth century, but the essays reach further back in time, and forward as well, as far as the present day, with a notes in one essay (by, uh, me) on Charles Bernstein, Ron Silliman, and company.

Here's what Kelly came up with when the good people at Palgrave MacMillan had her sum the whole project up in a couple of sentences:

Art for art's sake addresses the relationship between art and life, between the aesthetic and the social, and promotes the former term over the latter one in each instance. Although it has long been argued that aestheticism aims to de-humanize art, this volume seeks to consider the counterclaim that such de-humanization can also lead to re-humanization, to a deepened relationship between the aesthetic sphere and the world at large and between the artistic receptor and his or her human existence.

The book gathers together essays on a surprising range of authors: Baudelaire, Rossetti, Huysmans, Wilde, Nietzsche, André Breton, Nabokov, Adorno, Barthes and many more. Here's the opening of my own contribution, an essay called "The Aesthetic Anxiety: Avant-Garde Poetics, Autonomous Aesthetics, and the Idea of Politics":

If you are personally acquainted with any significant number of poets, you will perhaps not be surprised to find that the thesis of this essay is as follows: poets want to have their cake and eat it too. The particulars of the argument, though, go beyond the intuitive and the obvious, or so I hope. What I want to say is this: since the nineteenth century, poets have faced a dilemma. On the one hand, many poets have felt the allure of the radical freedoms of an entirely autonomous art, an art not in the heteronomous service of any religious function, ideological formation, moral system, cause, or institution, an art that exists for art’s sake alone. On the other hand, poets have faced the anxieties that such autonomy seems, inevitably, to create: fears of losing their readerships, their social roles, and their political utility. Many poets of the twentieth century, especially those affiliated with avant-garde movements, have been haunted by such anxieties, and have sought to assuage them by claiming that a commitment to aesthetic autonomy can, in and of itself, be a form of political action. Such an identification does not bridge the chasm between a belief in autonomous art and a belief in the kind of heteronomous art that serves a cause. Rather, it denies the existence of such a gap, and asserts that the disinterested pursuit of art for its own sake is also, by its very nature, politically efficacious.

Positions of this kind are by their nature fraught with contradictions, and raise many a question. Can withdrawal from political engagement be anything other than quietism? What are the politics of audience, when the art speaks neither to the disempowered classes nor to a significant element of the power elite? Can a political art still be autonomous, or does it bend its craft to a political end? Indeed, the attempt to work through such questions has been the driving force behind many an avant-garde polemic. Despite the difficulty of maintaining the identity of aesthetic autonomy and political utility, though, this dream of the poets has endured for the better part of a century.

Two groups of poets who attempt to identify aesthetic autonomy with the political — the surrealists and the language poets — are of particular interest because of the different forms of politics to which they to link autonomous aesthetics. Starting in the 1920s, the surrealists, under the general guidance of André Breton, sought a link between the radical imaginative freedom of their movement and the project of Communist revolution. Later, beginning in the 1970s, the American language poets sought to identify aesthetic freedom with a kind of negative politics — a politics of critique and resistance, rather than one conducted with a specific revolutionary utopia in mind. Whatever the form of politics, though, the enduring nature of the poet’s anxiety about reconciling aesthetic autonomy and political efficacy indicates that we may have reached a point in the history of poetics in which what I am calling the aesthetic anxiety (that is, the anxiety about the apparent political and social inutility of autonomous art) isn’t so much a passing crisis as it is a lasting condition of poetic production. Whether the solution to this anxiety proposed by the avant-garde poets can survive is, of course, another question, and one to which the answer, increasingly, seems to be “no.”

Langpo fundamentalists will probably want to punch me, but I'm hoping they'll get bored by my turgid academic prose half-way through the essay, and I'll be able to sneak off to my escape while they snore.

Anyway. You can pre-order the book now from Amazon or Barnes and Noble. Shop early! It makes a great gift!