THE EARLY POETRY OF JOHN ASHBERY

If by “early Ashbery” we mean roughly the poetry from the 1950s through the 1960s, there is a fascinating development from a relatively recognizable lyric poet into one of the most radically disjunctive American poets of the postwar period.

1. Some Trees (1956): the beautiful, strange beginning

Ashbery's first collection, Some Trees, won the Yale Younger Poets Prize, judged by W. H. Auden. It contains poems that are much more recognizable as poems in the conventional sense than his later work.

But even here, something unusual is happening.

Take the title poem, “Some Trees.” It begins:

“These are amazing: beautiful and free”

and proceeds through a meeting between two people surrounded by trees. The language is lyrical, but the poem continually makes ordinary perception feel slightly unstable. Things don't quite settle into a symbolic meaning.

One of Ashbery's important characteristics is already present: the poem doesn't necessarily tell you what the experience means; it lets the experience keep changing while you read it.

Another excellent early poem is “The Painter.” It was written while Ashbery was still at Harvard and is a sestina influenced by Auden and Elizabeth Bishop. The poem also begins Ashbery's long fascination with the relationship between poetry and visual art.

2. Then something happens: John Cage, chance, collage

Around 1952, Ashbery went through a long period of writer's block. A John Cage concert helped break it, and the encounter with Cage's use of chance became enormously important to his development.

This is one of the most useful things to know about Ashbery.

He became increasingly interested in allowing language to behave without being completely controlled by the poet.

Instead of:

thought → image → meaning → conclusion

you begin to get:

perception → memory → sound → another thought → someone else's voice → an image → a joke → uncertainty

The poem starts to resemble consciousness itself, rather than a carefully organized statement about consciousness.

Ashbery later described his process as accessing an “underground stream” in his mind and wanting the poetry to emerge as freshly and unexpectedly as possible.

3. The Tennis Court Oath (1962): the rupture

This is the book where the famous Ashbery really arrives.

And it is radically different from Some Trees. Ashbery himself later said that he was dissatisfied with the successful poems of Some Trees and wanted to take poetry apart and see what might happen.

The result is The Tennis Court Oath.

The title poem, for example, contains sequences like:

“What had you been thinking about”

followed by:

“the face studiously bloodied”

then:

“heaven blotted region”

then suddenly:

“I go on loving you like water but”

and later:

“You were not elected president, yet won the race”

There is no stable narrative connecting these things.

And yet the poem doesn't feel random in the ordinary sense. Language itself becomes the continuity.

One sentence creates an expectation; the next phrase redirects it. A word suggests another word. A sound leads somewhere. A grammatical structure begins and gets interrupted. Images collide.

The poem's logic is therefore less like a story and more like moving through a mind that refuses to edit itself into a coherent narrative.

You can read the complete poem at the Poetry Foundation.

4. Why people found him incomprehensible

This is important because Ashbery wasn't merely being “difficult.”

He was challenging one of the basic assumptions of lyric poetry: that beneath the strange language there should be a recoverable meaning.

A conventional difficult poem might make you think:

I don't understand this yet, but eventually I'll figure out what it means.

Ashbery often makes that expectation itself unstable.

You can understand every individual sentence and still not know what the poem is “about.”

And that isn't necessarily a failure.

His poems frequently behave like conversation overheard through a wall. You enter halfway through. Someone changes the subject. A memory interrupts. Someone else's voice appears. A phrase seems important and then disappears.

The Poetry Foundation describes his early work as testing conventional limits on how poems begin and end: many seem to enter an already ongoing discourse and stop without providing a conventional conclusion.

5. The fascinating thing: it isn't simply surrealism

I think this distinction matters.

Ashbery can look surrealistic because bizarre things happen:

“the calls . . .

I worry

the water beetle head”

But his poems aren't simply dream poems.

He is extraordinarily interested in ordinary American speech.

This is something he himself emphasized: American vernacular was an important stimulus for him. When he lived in France, his distance from hearing American speech contributed to the strange transformation that produced The Tennis Court Oath.

So you'll often encounter a peculiar mixture:

• elevated poetic language
• banal conversation
• newspaper language
• clichés
• pop culture
• philosophical language
• fragments of memory
• jokes
• visual description
• sudden lyric beauty

all occupying the same linguistic space.

That's part of what makes him feel so contemporary.

6. Rivers and Mountains (1966): beginning to put things back together

After the radical fragmentation of The Tennis Court Oath, Ashbery began moving toward something more synthesized.

He himself described The Tennis Court Oath as an attempt to “take poetry apart,” while Rivers and Mountains represented an attempt to synthesize different approaches.

That's why I'd actually recommend reading these three books as a progression:

Some Trees → The Tennis Court Oath → Rivers and Mountains

rather than starting with the later, famous Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.

You can watch a poet gradually discover that coherence doesn't have to mean conventional coherence.

7. What I find most interesting about early Ashbery

For me, the deepest thing isn't simply fragmentation.

It's his resistance to the idea that a poem has to become more meaningful as you get closer to its end.

A poem can remain unresolved.

A thought can remain half-formed.

A metaphor doesn't have to resolve into a symbol.

A sentence doesn't have to arrive at its destination.

A poem can simply continue happening.

Ashbery explicitly said that he didn't regard poems as closed works: they continue in his mind, and he sometimes merely “snip[s] off a length.”

That gives you a very good key to reading him.

Don't necessarily ask:

“What does this poem mean?”

Try asking:

“What kind of thinking is this poem allowing me to experience?”

That's where early Ashbery becomes extraordinarily rich.