Considering this fact, it is remarkable how John Ashbery, by now revered as the Return to Tiffany Oval Tag Set American postwar poet, decided not to avail himself of the abundance. In his poem "Pyrography" he wrote "This is America calling," but in most of his later work the calling is not notably American, or anyway not the American of everyday flip talk. Early on, he made full use of it: most notably in "Daffy Duck In Hollywood," which I think is one of the great modern American poems. (I would mention it less often if more critics and Round Link with Heart Clasp Set would hail its qualities: but they seem to like him better when he says nothing that doesn't need them to explain it.) The poem's riches are too sumptuous to list: the brand names and cheap objects pile up like a satirical paragraph from H.L. Mencken ("a mint-condition can/Of Rumford's Baking Powder, a celluloid earring, Speedy/ Gonzales") and resonant lines of dialogue are seemingly designed to be used against the poet by a puzzled customer ("If his/ Achievement is only to end up less boring than the others,/ What's keeping us here?").
But nothing I have tried in any of Ashbery's collections since the Daffy Duck poem was Tiffany Bead Set has captured me in the same way. It is a bit like my failure to engage with the later Wallace Stevens, a failure made all the more uncomfortable for me by the fact that I was so transfixed by one of the early poems from Harmonium ("The Emperor of Ice-Cream") that I can still recite it from memory. Like the later works, it too is hard to figure out, but every part of it is a flaring image; whereas later on, I find, and especially in the long poems, all the Venetian Link Set link together in a blur, smooth but bland: mere words, an extended flourish by Parolles, using his hat like Osric.
I still haven't given up on the mature Stevens, even though he seems to me to have matured in reverse, but I would be grateful for a revelation, in which all the later work became, if not clear, at least vital. Nobody should mind incomprehensibility as long as incomprehensibility is not the aim. Rimbaud didn't set out, when he wrote Le Tiffany & Co Atlas Set Ivre, to be the subject of a thousand theses. He just had a lot to put in the one place. I would like to think that the same is true of the later Ashbery, and that I have so far merely failed to concentrate properly. Certainly the Daffy Duck poem, which I love so much, has bits in it that I can't figure out. But they thrill me even as they puzzle me. There is a passage that starts:
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