{"id":{"repo_id":"cambridge","oai_identifier":"oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/384215"},"canonical_url":"https://search.dev.ndltd.org/etd/cambridge/oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/384215","repository":{"repo_id":"cambridge","name":"Cambridge University","base_url":"https://api.repository.cam.ac.uk/server/oai/request"},"display":{"title":"Being aesthetic after the American midcentury: Frank O'Hara, Barbara Guest, John Ashbery","abstract":"‘What else is there’, John Ashbery asked Kenneth Koch in 1965, ‘besides matters of taste?’ This thesis seeks to recover a neglected point of encounter between poetry and philosophy in postwar modernity: the crucial yet previously unexplored conjunction between first-generation New York poetry and philosophical aesthetics. Despite an increasing critical emphasis on the intellectual dimensions of New York School writing, its members are still regarded as the least philosophically-inclined of authors: Frank O’Hara’s famous description of lyric composition as ‘just go[ing] on your nerve’ remains emblematic of the poets’ apparently allergic resistance to formal philosophical analysis. Taking up three exemplary figures – Frank O’Hara, Barbara Guest, and John Ashbery – this thesis proposes a new reading of their work and its significance. Far from rejecting the concerns of aesthetic philosophy, the poets’ shared interest in questions of taste enabled them to engineer forms of lyric experience that are as thoughtful as they are exciting, liberating aesthetic inquiry from the constraints of philosophical prose. Not only does their writing enable new kinds of aesthetic encounter, but also new kinds of thinking about our experiences of art – forms of thought that are tied so intimately to the act of reading that they are inextricable from its pains and pleasures. In three extended chapters, I use materials that are either little-explored or entirely unknown – from O’Hara’s Harvard notebook to Guest’s uncollected poems – to map each poet’s early engagement with the questions and tensions of philosophical aesthetics, tracking these concerns into the texture of their lyric address. The first chapter examines O’Hara’s undergraduate engagement with Susanne Langer’s Philosophy in a New Key (1941), showing how her concern with meaning and symbolism inflects his early poetic experimentation. Taking up Langer’s concern with musical aesthetics, O’Hara creates forms of reading that aspire to the condition of music: aesthetic reflection becomes reinvented as a series of effervescent and time-bound moments of pleasure, as uncapturable in the display-cabinet of discursive language as music itself. Where O’Hara’s lyric forms aspire to brevity, Guest’s poetic address invites the longue durée of history into the space of reading. My second chapter investigates Guest’s early engagement with Partisan Review, the journal in which her first poem was published, and for which she acted as poetry editor from 1955 to 1958. Liberating Partisan’s emphasis on the historical dimensions of aesthetic experience from the journal’s critical prose, Guest began to develop lyric forms in which aesthetic reflection is reunited with the historical conditions that make it possible. Her 1968 breakthrough volume The Blue Stairs contaminates our post-Enlightenment experience of art with the horrors of the Vietnam war, presenting an implicit rebuke to O’Hara’s ahistorical poetics. A third chapter shows John Ashbery grappling with the intellectual and social anxieties latent in judgements of taste, anxieties that surface in his neglected newspaper journalism of the 1960s. Where his famously intractable volume The Tennis Court Oath (1962) seeks to dismantle the possibility of aesthetic judgement, crowding it out with an array of excremental and discomfortingly bodily affects, Ashbery’s breakthrough long poem ‘The Skaters’ (1964) harnesses the uncertainty of aesthetic reflection to conduct a deft inquiry into the uncertainty of life itself: through his structuring allusion to Frederick Ashton’s 1938 ballet Les Patineurs, Ashbery reworks the tensions of Kantian aesthetics into a responsive, affectively resonant lyric experience of subjective fragility. An exploratory coda suggests that the poets’ desire to invite aesthetic reflection into the moment of poetic reading is responsible for one of the most remarkable aspects of their lyrics: their ability to dismantle the opposition between aesthetic delight and serious thought, sensuous immediacy and abstract cognition. In doing so, the poets enable their work to survive beyond the quotidian minutiae and particulars of reference which often make up their texture – and to become, as O’Hara wrote of death in 1958, ‘suddenly inhabited by you without permission’.","abstract_html":"‘What else is there’, John Ashbery asked Kenneth Koch in 1965, ‘besides matters of taste?’ This thesis seeks to recover a neglected point of encounter between poetry and philosophy in postwar modernity: the crucial yet previously unexplored conjunction between first-generation New York poetry and philosophical aesthetics. Despite an increasing critical emphasis on the intellectual dimensions of New York School writing, its members are still regarded as the least philosophically-inclined of authors: Frank O’Hara’s famous description of lyric composition as ‘just go[ing] on your nerve’ remains emblematic of the poets’ apparently allergic resistance to formal philosophical analysis. Taking up three exemplary figures – Frank O’Hara, Barbara Guest, and John Ashbery – this thesis proposes a new reading of their work and its significance. Far from rejecting the concerns of aesthetic philosophy, the poets’ shared interest in questions of taste enabled them to engineer forms of lyric experience that are as thoughtful as they are exciting, liberating aesthetic inquiry from the constraints of philosophical prose. Not only does their writing enable new kinds of aesthetic encounter, but also new kinds of thinking about our experiences of art – forms of thought that are tied so intimately to the act of reading that they are inextricable from its pains and pleasures. In three extended chapters, I use materials that are either little-explored or entirely unknown – from O’Hara’s Harvard notebook to Guest’s uncollected poems – to map each poet’s early engagement with the questions and tensions of philosophical aesthetics, tracking these concerns into the texture of their lyric address. The first chapter examines O’Hara’s undergraduate engagement with Susanne Langer’s Philosophy in a New Key (1941), showing how her concern with meaning and symbolism inflects his early poetic experimentation. Taking up Langer’s concern with musical aesthetics, O’Hara creates forms of reading that aspire to the condition of music: aesthetic reflection becomes reinvented as a series of effervescent and time-bound moments of pleasure, as uncapturable in the display-cabinet of discursive language as music itself. Where O’Hara’s lyric forms aspire to brevity, Guest’s poetic address invites the longue durée of history into the space of reading. My second chapter investigates Guest’s early engagement with Partisan Review, the journal in which her first poem was published, and for which she acted as poetry editor from 1955 to 1958. Liberating Partisan’s emphasis on the historical dimensions of aesthetic experience from the journal’s critical prose, Guest began to develop lyric forms in which aesthetic reflection is reunited with the historical conditions that make it possible. Her 1968 breakthrough volume The Blue Stairs contaminates our post-Enlightenment experience of art with the horrors of the Vietnam war, presenting an implicit rebuke to O’Hara’s ahistorical poetics. A third chapter shows John Ashbery grappling with the intellectual and social anxieties latent in judgements of taste, anxieties that surface in his neglected newspaper journalism of the 1960s. Where his famously intractable volume The Tennis Court Oath (1962) seeks to dismantle the possibility of aesthetic judgement, crowding it out with an array of excremental and discomfortingly bodily affects, Ashbery’s breakthrough long poem ‘The Skaters’ (1964) harnesses the uncertainty of aesthetic reflection to conduct a deft inquiry into the uncertainty of life itself: through his structuring allusion to Frederick Ashton’s 1938 ballet Les Patineurs, Ashbery reworks the tensions of Kantian aesthetics into a responsive, affectively resonant lyric experience of subjective fragility. An exploratory coda suggests that the poets’ desire to invite aesthetic reflection into the moment of poetic reading is responsible for one of the most remarkable aspects of their lyrics: their ability to dismantle the opposition between aesthetic delight and serious thought, sensuous immediacy and abstract cognition. In doing so, the poets enable their work to survive beyond the quotidian minutiae and particulars of reference which often make up their texture – and to become, as O’Hara wrote of death in 1958, ‘suddenly inhabited by you without permission’.","abstract_has_math":false,"creators":["Brewis, Oliver"],"institution":"University of Cambridge","degree_name":"Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)","degree_level":"Doctoral","degree_discipline":null,"degree_department":null,"school":null,"contributors":[],"advisors":["Milne, Drew","Houen, Alex","Green, Fiona"],"committee_chairs":[],"committee_members":[],"year":2024,"date_issued":"2024-07-31","date_published":"2024-07-31","updated_at":"2026-07-22T22:24:23Z","subjects":["English literature","Philosophical aesthetics","Aesthetics","New York School","Poetics","Lyric","Frank O'Hara","Barbara Guest","John Ashbery"],"languages":["eng"],"rights":[],"rights_urls":["https://apollo8-f-pro.lib.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/498ca8a6-67f3-4290-b7ef-dfeecad0e568/download","http://purl.org/NET/rdflicense/allrightsreserved"],"identifier_entries":[]},"links":{"outbound_url":"https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.118288","outbound_label":"DOI","outbound_source":"dc:identifier.doi"},"metadata_groups":[{"id":"people","label":"People","entries":[{"key":"dc:contributor.advisor","label":"Advisor","values":["Milne, Drew","Houen, Alex","Green, Fiona"]},{"key":"dc:creator","label":"Author","values":["Brewis, Oliver"]}]},{"id":"academic_context","label":"Academic Context","entries":[{"key":"dc:date.issued","label":"Date","values":["2024-07-31"]},{"key":"dc:publisher.institution","label":"Dc Publisher Institution","values":["University of Cambridge"]},{"key":"dc:relation.isreferencedby.uri","label":"Dc Relation Isreferencedby URI","values":["https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/384215"]},{"key":"dc:type","label":"Dc Type","values":["Thesis"]},{"key":"dc:type.qualificationlevel","label":"Dc Type Qualificationlevel","values":["Doctoral"]},{"key":"dc:type.qualificationname","label":"Dc Type Qualificationname","values":["Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)"]}]},{"id":"subjects_keywords","label":"Subjects and Keywords","entries":[{"key":"dc:subject","label":"Dc Subject","values":["English literature","Philosophical aesthetics","Aesthetics","New York School","Poetics","Lyric","Frank O'Hara","Barbara Guest","John Ashbery"]}]},{"id":"language_rights","label":"Language and Rights","entries":[{"key":"dc:language","label":"Dc Language","values":["eng"]},{"key":"dc:rights","label":"Dc Rights","values":["https://apollo8-f-pro.lib.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/498ca8a6-67f3-4290-b7ef-dfeecad0e568/download","http://purl.org/NET/rdflicense/allrightsreserved"]},{"key":"dc:rights.embargodate","label":"Dc Rights Embargodate","values":["2026-05-20"]},{"key":"dc:rights.embargotype","label":"Dc Rights Embargotype","values":["embargo"]}]},{"id":"identifiers","label":"Identifiers","entries":[{"key":"dc:identifier.doi","label":"DOI","values":["https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.118288"]},{"key":"dc:identifier.uri","label":"Identifier URI","values":["https://apollo8-f-pro.lib.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/862d69d6-f7a1-410d-96ac-5e8a888fba6a/download"]}]},{"id":"additional","label":"Additional Metadata","entries":[{"key":"dc:description.abstract","label":"Abstract","values":["‘What else is there’, John Ashbery asked Kenneth Koch in 1965, ‘besides matters of taste?’ This thesis seeks to recover a neglected point of encounter between poetry and philosophy in postwar modernity: the crucial yet previously unexplored conjunction between first-generation New York poetry and philosophical aesthetics. Despite an increasing critical emphasis on the intellectual dimensions of New York School writing, its members are still regarded as the least philosophically-inclined of authors: Frank O’Hara’s famous description of lyric composition as ‘just go[ing] on your nerve’ remains emblematic of the poets’ apparently allergic resistance to formal philosophical analysis. Taking up three exemplary figures – Frank O’Hara, Barbara Guest, and John Ashbery – this thesis proposes a new reading of their work and its significance. Far from rejecting the concerns of aesthetic philosophy, the poets’ shared interest in questions of taste enabled them to engineer forms of lyric experience that are as thoughtful as they are exciting, liberating aesthetic inquiry from the constraints of philosophical prose. Not only does their writing enable new kinds of aesthetic encounter, but also new kinds of thinking about our experiences of art – forms of thought that are tied so intimately to the act of reading that they are inextricable from its pains and pleasures. In three extended chapters, I use materials that are either little-explored or entirely unknown – from O’Hara’s Harvard notebook to Guest’s uncollected poems – to map each poet’s early engagement with the questions and tensions of philosophical aesthetics, tracking these concerns into the texture of their lyric address. The first chapter examines O’Hara’s undergraduate engagement with Susanne Langer’s Philosophy in a New Key (1941), showing how her concern with meaning and symbolism inflects his early poetic experimentation. Taking up Langer’s concern with musical aesthetics, O’Hara creates forms of reading that aspire to the condition of music: aesthetic reflection becomes reinvented as a series of effervescent and time-bound moments of pleasure, as uncapturable in the display-cabinet of discursive language as music itself. Where O’Hara’s lyric forms aspire to brevity, Guest’s poetic address invites the longue durée of history into the space of reading. My second chapter investigates Guest’s early engagement with Partisan Review, the journal in which her first poem was published, and for which she acted as poetry editor from 1955 to 1958. Liberating Partisan’s emphasis on the historical dimensions of aesthetic experience from the journal’s critical prose, Guest began to develop lyric forms in which aesthetic reflection is reunited with the historical conditions that make it possible. Her 1968 breakthrough volume The Blue Stairs contaminates our post-Enlightenment experience of art with the horrors of the Vietnam war, presenting an implicit rebuke to O’Hara’s ahistorical poetics. A third chapter shows John Ashbery grappling with the intellectual and social anxieties latent in judgements of taste, anxieties that surface in his neglected newspaper journalism of the 1960s. Where his famously intractable volume The Tennis Court Oath (1962) seeks to dismantle the possibility of aesthetic judgement, crowding it out with an array of excremental and discomfortingly bodily affects, Ashbery’s breakthrough long poem ‘The Skaters’ (1964) harnesses the uncertainty of aesthetic reflection to conduct a deft inquiry into the uncertainty of life itself: through his structuring allusion to Frederick Ashton’s 1938 ballet Les Patineurs, Ashbery reworks the tensions of Kantian aesthetics into a responsive, affectively resonant lyric experience of subjective fragility. An exploratory coda suggests that the poets’ desire to invite aesthetic reflection into the moment of poetic reading is responsible for one of the most remarkable aspects of their lyrics: their ability to dismantle the opposition between aesthetic delight and serious thought, sensuous immediacy and abstract cognition. In doing so, the poets enable their work to survive beyond the quotidian minutiae and particulars of reference which often make up their texture – and to become, as O’Hara wrote of death in 1958, ‘suddenly inhabited by you without permission’."]},{"key":"dc:format.checksum.md5","label":"Dc Format Checksum Md5","values":["ac165b5779d44d15885426db8c851bc3","87eda9de84448d1f82354d60eee3eb5f"]},{"key":"dc:title","label":"Title","values":["Being aesthetic after the American midcentury: Frank O'Hara, Barbara Guest, John Ashbery"]}]}],"canonical_facts":{"dc:contributor.advisor":["Milne, Drew","Houen, Alex","Green, Fiona"],"dc:creator":["Brewis, Oliver"],"dc:date.issued":["2024-07-31"],"dc:description.abstract":["‘What else is there’, John Ashbery asked Kenneth Koch in 1965, ‘besides matters of taste?’ This thesis seeks to recover a neglected point of encounter between poetry and philosophy in postwar modernity: the crucial yet previously unexplored conjunction between first-generation New York poetry and philosophical aesthetics. Despite an increasing critical emphasis on the intellectual dimensions of New York School writing, its members are still regarded as the least philosophically-inclined of authors: Frank O’Hara’s famous description of lyric composition as ‘just go[ing] on your nerve’ remains emblematic of the poets’ apparently allergic resistance to formal philosophical analysis. Taking up three exemplary figures – Frank O’Hara, Barbara Guest, and John Ashbery – this thesis proposes a new reading of their work and its significance. Far from rejecting the concerns of aesthetic philosophy, the poets’ shared interest in questions of taste enabled them to engineer forms of lyric experience that are as thoughtful as they are exciting, liberating aesthetic inquiry from the constraints of philosophical prose. Not only does their writing enable new kinds of aesthetic encounter, but also new kinds of thinking about our experiences of art – forms of thought that are tied so intimately to the act of reading that they are inextricable from its pains and pleasures. In three extended chapters, I use materials that are either little-explored or entirely unknown – from O’Hara’s Harvard notebook to Guest’s uncollected poems – to map each poet’s early engagement with the questions and tensions of philosophical aesthetics, tracking these concerns into the texture of their lyric address. The first chapter examines O’Hara’s undergraduate engagement with Susanne Langer’s Philosophy in a New Key (1941), showing how her concern with meaning and symbolism inflects his early poetic experimentation. Taking up Langer’s concern with musical aesthetics, O’Hara creates forms of reading that aspire to the condition of music: aesthetic reflection becomes reinvented as a series of effervescent and time-bound moments of pleasure, as uncapturable in the display-cabinet of discursive language as music itself. Where O’Hara’s lyric forms aspire to brevity, Guest’s poetic address invites the longue durée of history into the space of reading. My second chapter investigates Guest’s early engagement with Partisan Review, the journal in which her first poem was published, and for which she acted as poetry editor from 1955 to 1958. Liberating Partisan’s emphasis on the historical dimensions of aesthetic experience from the journal’s critical prose, Guest began to develop lyric forms in which aesthetic reflection is reunited with the historical conditions that make it possible. Her 1968 breakthrough volume The Blue Stairs contaminates our post-Enlightenment experience of art with the horrors of the Vietnam war, presenting an implicit rebuke to O’Hara’s ahistorical poetics. A third chapter shows John Ashbery grappling with the intellectual and social anxieties latent in judgements of taste, anxieties that surface in his neglected newspaper journalism of the 1960s. Where his famously intractable volume The Tennis Court Oath (1962) seeks to dismantle the possibility of aesthetic judgement, crowding it out with an array of excremental and discomfortingly bodily affects, Ashbery’s breakthrough long poem ‘The Skaters’ (1964) harnesses the uncertainty of aesthetic reflection to conduct a deft inquiry into the uncertainty of life itself: through his structuring allusion to Frederick Ashton’s 1938 ballet Les Patineurs, Ashbery reworks the tensions of Kantian aesthetics into a responsive, affectively resonant lyric experience of subjective fragility. An exploratory coda suggests that the poets’ desire to invite aesthetic reflection into the moment of poetic reading is responsible for one of the most remarkable aspects of their lyrics: their ability to dismantle the opposition between aesthetic delight and serious thought, sensuous immediacy and abstract cognition. 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