18 pages • 36 minutes read
John AshberyThe Painter
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1955A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Biographical Context
Although Ashbery made a fantastically successful career out of poetry, the impact of painting and visual art in his life is not to be underestimated. As a child, Ashbery spent a good deal of time drawing and painting, and his first aspirations were to become a painter. Although the discussion of painting is symbolic of art in all its forms in “The Painter” (including and especially poetry), Ashbery’s dream of becoming a painter infuses the choice with meaning. As an adult, Ashbery financially supported his poetry career with a parallel career in art criticism. Both in New York and France, Ashbery reviewed art shows and exhibitions, gaining a working knowledge of the painting of the day. In fact, Ashbery—along with his close friend Frank O’Hara—have long been considered poets whose work is strongly influenced by painting, both in its textual strategies and underlying theory. While “The Painter” is an early poem of Ashbery’s and preceded much of his work in art criticism and art journalism, it demonstrates the lifelong passion Ashbery had for painting and the visual arts.
Literary Context
“The Painter” appears in Ashbery’s first book of poetry, Some Trees (1956). Like most first collections of poetry, the book was published as part of its being awarded a prize—in this case, the Yale Younger Poets prize, which is perhaps the most prestigious first-collection prize in the United States. As part of its long-running tradition, a guest poet is chosen each year to award the prize. In 1956, W. H. Auden was chosen as guest judge. In a controversial move, Auden decided not to award any of the manuscripts he was given due to what he deemed a lack of quality. To avoid this extreme result, Auden was given manuscripts that were eliminated in earlier rounds of the contest—including Ashbery’s debut Some Trees. Auden awarded Ashbery the prize and publication, writing an introduction for his collection that expressed both admiration and ambivalence for the young poet’s strange and sometimes obscure style.
While American poetry saw its share of opacity and strangeness, the dominant poetry scene was still easily understandable and firmly representational. W. H. Auden dominated the English-language poetry scene as its foremost poet at the time. Ashbery was reading Auden since his schooldays and had even written his Harvard undergraduate thesis on Auden’s poetry. W. H. Auden’s poetry is known for its precision and clarity of craft, a marked difference from the avant-garde thrust of Ashbery’s work. Ashbery’s closeness to the painting scene at the time made him intimately aware of abstract expressionism and even pop art, both forms that pushed far outside the boundaries of traditional representationalism. This knowledge deeply impacted his work and, though “The Painter” is written in a largely traditional mode, dictated the thematic concerns of the poem in question.
