The Antipopulist Poetics of John Ashbery, 2012-2016, [and] Unity Candidates: A Collection of Poetry

Reynolds, Jacob (2025) The Antipopulist Poetics of John Ashbery, 2012-2016, [and] Unity Candidates: A Collection of Poetry. Doctoral thesis, University of East Anglia.

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Abstract

The Antipopulist Poetics of John Ashbery, 2012-2016
This thesis proposes that an antipopulist poetics underpins the final three poetry collections published by the American poet John Ashbery. I argue that populism, a discursive-performative phenomenon, is comprised of three key rhetorical features (an antipluralist cleavage of the population into ‘the people’ versus ‘the establishment’, the construction of feelings of crisis, and the oversimplification of complex problems), and that Ashbery’s collections Quick Question (2012), Breezeway (2015), and Commotion of the Birds (2016), written in the context of a populist resurgence in the American political mainstream, resist populist rhetoric in a way that distinctively develops Ashbery’s ‘difficult’ poetic voice. With a particular emphasis on the role that crisis-construction plays in the populist performance, the thesis both affords the innovative nature of Ashbery’s final collections a critical attention and appreciation that they were not given by contemporary reviewers, and offers a new insight into the existing critical literature concerning his poetry’s relationship with contemporary American politics.

Unity Candidates
This collection of poems seeks to interrogate the assumption of unity inherent in the populist usage of the first-person plural pronoun. The poems and sequences invest (via character, voice, and form) considerable hope in the ambitions of the first-person plural, only for these hopes to fail, fall short, or be complicated by other factors. In this respect, each of the poems and sequences are constituent ‘unity candidates’ in that they strive for a sense of collective unity that ultimately proves illusory, or flawed. While these experiments in and querying of these assumptions of the first-person plural demonstrate its limitations, the respective attempts from a breadth of speakers and voices are not intended to be cynical in their failures but, rather, charming, and even honourable, in their reliance on and investment in the first-person plural as a means of seeking a sense of belonging.

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Arts and Humanities > School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing
Depositing User:	Chris White
Date Deposited:	17 Mar 2026 11:10
Last Modified:	17 Mar 2026 11:10
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/102361
DOI:

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