本文是一篇英语论文，笔者认为象征主义是Ashbery表达抽象精神和现实的一种方法，因为他生活和诗歌中的一切都可能是一种象征，比如树、水、镜子、气球、花、云等等。Ashbery通过这些象征找到了人类与他们生活的世界之间的联系。联系是一件令人惊叹的事情，它为我们提供了公司，将自然和社会编织在一起，甚至将想象力融入现实。
Chapter One: Ashbery’s Musical Symbology in Postwar USA
1.1 Psychological & Environmental Elements in Ashbery’s Poems
英语论文参考
Ashbery’s poetry changes with times, but his exploration of the form and inner musicality of poetry remains the same. Because of his innovation of the poetic form, he abandons the traditional form of rhymed lines and expresses what is on his mind in abstract forms. When the reader encounters his poetry and thinks about it, the reading consciousness and Ashbery’s poetry are combined together like different instruments in a symphony, existing as a harmonic thing with each reader retaining his own peculiar receptions. T. S. Eliot summarizes Valéry’s analogy of poetry to architecture, dance to music:
[H]e always maintained that assimilation of Poetry to Music which was a Symbolist tenet....For music itself may be conceived as striving towards an unattainable timelessness; and if the other arts may be thought of as yearning for duration, so Music may be thought of as yearning for the stillness of painting or sculpture. (xiv)
Eliot thinks that we can enjoy music and feel its inner color of emotion even though we do not have any technical training in music.
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1.2 Origin of Musicality in Poetic Theory
French poets’ theorization of Symbolism goes beyond the tradition and reveals avant-garde features of the emerging development of free verse, a new musicality. Valéry inherits from Mallarmé’s, Baudelaire’s, and Rimbaud’s theories of modern poetry which constitute an important part of the free verse movement. These French poets were in turn influenced by the American writer Edgar Allan Poe, especially Baudelaire, and their avant-garde genre was thus a continuous passing-on. For Ashbery, French Symbolism was a major influence in his early career, a common factor for all young poets of the New York School. Poe thinks that the origin of poetry pertains to music3, whereas the French symbolists have developed the connection more deeply, giving it new and wider definitions. For Baudelaire, a poet’s inner thoughts and feelings are clouded by reality, and the ultimate intention of symbolism is to go beyond reality into a world of pure ideas, either the idea in the poet’s heart, including his feelings, or the idea of Platonic perfection, the supersensual world poets aspire to. The symphony of poetry universally connects and forms a whole, in which everything is an element, and each element is closely connected to another—any change or movement of the element brings repercussions and echoes. Human feelings are not just feelings; they express thoughts.
Mallarme proposes to understand music from the Greek etymology of music “muse,” in which music means “idea.” Compared with music, poetry is closer to soul and spirit, achieving higher effects than music because it does not rely on the materiality of sound and does not need the intermediary of musical instruments but directly depends on the internal power of language. When language reaches its peak of wisdom, it is bound to form abundant and obvious musicality. It is the universal ideal for symbolist poets to reach the spiritual state by musicality.
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Chapter Two: Symbolist Theory in Ashbery’s Works
2.1 Symbolism and Myth in “Syringa”
The time Ashbery had lived in is mostly the postwar era, and after he grew up, there was widespread post-war prosperity in the US, in which postmodern literature also flourished. Ashbery’s innovation of poetry includes many iconic elements in postmodern literature that includes dissolving the binary oppositions, which could be seen as creating disharmonies in the first place, but deconstruction also calls for the reconstruction of order or balance somehow; therefore, the heartfelt song that Ashbery sings by his pen would become a variation in a complex melody. Readers are easily overwhelmed or puzzled by his fantastic imaginations and abstract expressions.
For example, Ashbery reconstructs traditional legends in his poem “Syringa,” which relays the ancient Greece myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. The death of Eurydice made Orpheus, the talented poet and musician, almost mad, so the poet “destroyed” his admirers through his art. “In Ashbery’s formulation, Orpheus represents the desire to resurrect or keep alive the memory of what was lost, most often expressed in elegies and other artistic forms that hearken back to the past for added aesthetic weight” (Bloom, John Ashbery 110). Orpheus in this poem has lost his ability to resurrect or keep alive the memory of what was lost, and then he abandoned his admirers with a lament that destroyed them. Ashbery imagines the scene afterthe plot in traditional myth—Orpheus torn apart by woman Bacchantes. In other words, after Orpheus died, he kept in his mind what he had given the world—music and poetry.
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2.2 Ashbery’s Self-Portrait amid Symbols
The title of Ashbery’s 2003 collection, Chinese Whispers, connects poetry to a “parlor game” (Zuba 262) directly and recalls the New York School atmosphere that favored all kinds of artistic competition and collaboration. Ashbery’s style is changing with times, but he seems to keep the avant-garde status. New York is also exerting its charm all over the world as a famous locus of economy and culture, the largest city in the US. New York School of poetry is a product of New York City for the atmosphere and environment, including the communications between NYC and major European cities and other exotic parts of the world like Asia. He found inspiration from Chinese ancient poetry and Japanese Haiku somehow, in his later works especially in 21st century we can seek out evidence of that.
Ashbery had a rather good childhood according to his autobiographical poem “The Picture of Little J. A. in a Prospect of Flowers” discussed earlier. He had some new feelings when he wrote down this poem as an adult:
Darkness falls like a wet sponge And Dick gives Genevieve a swift punch In the pajamas. ‘Aroint thee, witch.’ Her tongue from previous ecstasy Releases thoughts like little hats. (SP 12)
Metaphors and images from Ashbery’s later life still shine in his memory of youth, for the last two lines of part one, he wrote, “In a far recess of summer / Monks are playing soccer.” “Monks” seem to have little connection with those “playing soccer,” if Ashbery just describes a picture in his brain, it’s possible for the line to make sense.
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Chapter Three: Free Verse and Classical Form: From Form to Content ......................... 25
3.1 Whitman and Ashbery: Heritage and Development .................................... 26
3.2 Emerson’s Transcendentalism and the Relevance to Ashbery .......................... 29
3.3 Postmodernism, Stevens, and Ashbery .................................... 32
Conclusion ................................... 35
Chapter Three: Free Verse and Classical Form: From Form to Content
3.1 Whitman and Ashbery: Heritage and Development
Throughout Whitman’s masterpiece Leaves of Grass, published in 1855, free verse appears as a long and changeable line of poetry not relying on the repetition of the pace but repetitions, parallels and change of rhythmic units and speech statements, making the verse rhythmic. It reveals that although Whitman has broken the traditional rhythm and declared that poetry should have its own form different from the traditional verse, Whitman’s “free verse” was not considered by most poets to be the originator of modern poetry. Whitman believes that the US should not imitate European culture, because America has its own form of politics, rich material resources and more democratic freedom. The US is suitable for God as the testing ground for the realization of a higher degree of democratic freedom. It is on the basis of this political point of view that Whitman maintains that the form of poetry lies not in the rhythm or uniformity of rhythm, not in the expression of syllables, accents and rhymes of traditional poetry, but in the performance of the themes. So he solemnly declared that he was full of missions, not satisfied with imitating the traditional European form of poetry, but to use the novel form of free poetry to express the great American life, magnificent rivers and mountains, to form a unique artistic style of the inpidual. Therefore, this kind of thought naturally becomes a psychological basis of Whitman’s free verse.
英语论文怎么写
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Conclusion
Ashbery’s poetry is a mixture of heritage and progress which has absorbed the advantages of American culture and European traditions. Like the symbol of the “tree” he often uses, his root is in New York and his branch stretches all over America and the West. Musicality is a long-lived element in the history of poetry, which at the beginning existed in rhymes, stanzas and meter mostly. After the popular free verse and modern movement, poets started to form the abstract creative spirit into specific poems and prose. Before the modern free verse had formed in the early 20th century, Valéry and previous French symbolism poets like Baudelaire, Mallarme all wrote poetry and prose to innovate theories of the inner world echoing outside word, building up the base for poets in the coming century. Free verse is a tolerant form for those who are willing to deal with the world changing swiftly. So when they read the new kind of poetry that has broken the barriers of various rules and laws, the musicality of poetry without traditional rhymes, iambics, stanzas and meters started to become their preferred form.
John Ashbery is one of the best poets in 20th century’s America, as his applying of abstract expression is perfect and easy to move readers in the way of a musical player who is good at absorbing the feelings from daily life and earlier American poets such as Whitman, Emerson and Stevens. Ashbery has not lost the good traditions along the way of developing his own styles but fitting his poems along the progress of American society. In other words, poetry is never a soliloquy or a monologue, because the unique inner world of everyone would collide inevitably with the outside world and thus create (dis)harmonies. How to make these tensions harmonious is a hard but necessary theme for poets living in the present world. To resolve these oppositions and tensions into one thing is just like conducting an orchestra: the conductor has to operate on every instrument and bring out the best sound.
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