Plastic language: John Ashbery's ‘Europe’

Abstract

John Ashbery's early collection of poems The Tennis Court Oath elicited extreme reactions from literary critics, most significantly Harold Bloom, who had elsewhere hailed Ashbery as the spiritual heir to Wallace Stevens and the American romantic tradition. Bloom described The Tennis Court Oath as ‘calculated incoherence’ and stubbornly maintained that Ashbery was employing an alien technique — a painterly or musical manipulation of language — that disqualified it as poetry: ‘Poems may be like pictures or like music, or like whatever you will, but if they are paintings or musical works they will not be poems. The Ashbery of The Tennis Court Oath may have been moved by De Kooning or Kline, Webern or Cage, but he was not moved to the writing of poems.’1