A Hegemon’s Privilege: T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets and John Ashbery’s Three Poems
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John Ashbery’s Three Poems can be read as a postmodern response to T. S. Eliot’s modernist Four Quartets. Eliot builds his poem on the lyric impulse to create a moment of stillness in the midst of temporal flow, and that lyric impulse gains a specifically Christian center when Eliot identifies the “Incarnation” as the ultimate “still point” of “the turning world.” A close examination of Three Poems shows Ashbery echoing particular language and ideas of Four Quartets in order to deconstruct the lyric desire as well as Eliot’s Christian assertion of a fixed center that counters our temporal entrapment. While Eliot’s Eurocentric fixation on a Christian world-view creates problematic implications for non-Western readers in elevating that world-view over their own cultural constructions, Ashbery’s more egalitarian emphasis might be read as more open to non-Western cultural constructions. However, Ashbery’s apolitical absorption in the subject, especially the decentered subject, might be just as problematic in its own Eurocentrism. As critiques of postmodernism have argued, the decentered identity of the postmodern subject was privileged just as non-Western and ethnic populations were giving voice to their own identities. Ashbery’s apolitical subjectivity suggests a hegemon’s pleasure in self-exploration, however digressive and decentered that self might be, and marks a privileged Western position. Ashbery’s anti-hierarchical and exploratory critique of Eliot might suggest a way to a more successful aesthetic opposition to Eurocentricity, but it does not take that way itself.
Abstract
John Ashbery’s Three Poems can be read as a postmodern response to T. S. Eliot’s modernist Four Quartets. Eliot builds his poem on the lyric impulse to create a moment of stillness in the midst of temporal flow, and that lyric impulse gains a specifically Christian center when Eliot identifies the “Incarnation” as the ultimate “still point” of “the turning world.” A close examination of Three Poems shows Ashbery echoing particular language and ideas of Four Quartets in order to deconstruct the lyric desire as well as Eliot’s Christian assertion of a fixed center that counters our temporal entrapment. While Eliot’s Eurocentric fixation on a Christian world-view creates problematic implications for non-Western readers in elevating that world-view over their own cultural constructions, Ashbery’s more egalitarian emphasis might be read as more open to non-Western cultural constructions. However, Ashbery’s apolitical absorption in the subject, especially the decentered subject, might be just as problematic in its own Eurocentrism. As critiques of postmodernism have argued, the decentered identity of the postmodern subject was privileged just as non-Western and ethnic populations were giving voice to their own identities. Ashbery’s apolitical subjectivity suggests a hegemon’s pleasure in self-exploration, however digressive and decentered that self might be, and marks a privileged Western position. Ashbery’s anti-hierarchical and exploratory critique of Eliot might suggest a way to a more successful aesthetic opposition to Eurocentricity, but it does not take that way itself.
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