Contemporary Poetry as Philosophy: Subjective Agency in John Ashbery and C. K. Williams
1992; University of Wisconsin Press; Volume: 33; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/1208669
ISSN1548-9949
Autores Tópico(s)Musicology and Musical Analysis
Resumoform for treating all moments analogous opportunities. The lovers affirm not only moments that their story makes possible but also condition of connectedness that secures their relationship because of how they can engage flow of time. And since this connectedness does not depend on any single images or specific idealized qualities, their modest exchange yields access to a mode of sublimity in which very form of lovers' time opens on to an open future. Ultimately these reflections on really lead us back to poem's title its emblem for transformations of traditional romance agency that Ashbery accomplishes. On one level As We Know is astonishingly anti-ideal. It calls up all banalities which constitute love's quotidian reality and define the way had come. But what title denies itself on level of romantic content, it claims for itself in relation to state of reflective activity achieved within poem's final gesture. This now has substance only lovers form a we in process of telling itself. Similarly a moment becomes really only two sensibilities contour themselves to it-temporally by yielding their attention and modally by recognizing that very substance of moment is two independent ways of knowing joined through as of telling. There a we is composed. And there as sanctifies that we by calling attention indexically to precisely poem's processes of intensification, read. Yet need no image, and no projected identities. The really literally takes place a relational mode within activity of speaking-mimetically between poem's lovers and psychologically in reader's experience of this dynamics of telling becoming a figure for his or her own powers to make subjective investments without specular projections. I do not think any philosopher gives us fully developed a rendering of subjective agency immanent to indexical uses of language, yet thereby capable of establishing long-term aspects of identity for agents. But in order to understand and provide a context for this achievement must turn to history of ideas so to clarify specific pressures on contemporary sensibilities that Ashbery is responding to and to indicate some of conceptual possibilities that This content downloaded from 207.46.13.28 on Tue, 30 Aug 2016 04:41:09 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
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