UC Berkeley

This dissertation contends that the first-generation New York School poets—especially John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, and James Schuyler—develop the aesthetic possibilities of the philosophical stance that William James called “radical empiricism.” James followed the British empiricists in granting priority to parts, individuals, and unanalyzed sensations, but he radicalized the empiricist perspective by holding experiences of cohesion and relation to be as real as those of disjunction and discrete sensation. Schuyler, Ashbery, and O’Hara each practice an empiricist poetics: a poetics of the everyday, the felt, and the miscellaneous. At the same time, their poetries pose challenges to the conceptions of experience on which empiricism historically has been based, from the presumption of a unified experiencing subject to the relegation of sensation and abstraction to separate orders of reality. I argue that these challenges should not be seen as a denial of experience, as some postmodernist readings of New York School poetry allege, but as part of a careful and critical commitment to experience. As radical empiricists, these poets understand experience not as an inward phenomenon but as a field in which inner and outer are merely potential and constantly shifting divisions.

In the first chapter, I locate a precedent for Ashbery’s radical-empiricist poetics in Gertrude Stein’s Stanzas in Meditation, arguing that both Stein and Ashbery confound the conceptions of experience that predominate in critical assessments of modern and postmodern poetry and art. In the second chapter, O’Hara’s poetry presses the necessity of distinguishing between radical-empiricist poetics and the influential poetics of pragmatism. O’Hara shares pragmatism’s conception of experience as fluid and precarious, but his poems highlight affective dimensions of experience that are lost when poetry is understood pragmatically, as an instrument designed to provide the reader, or the poet, with momentary clarity and provisional ideals conducive to her progress in an unsteady world. Chapter Three analyzes the technique of bathetic deflation that Schuyler employs to forestall the idealization of notions like experience, self, and nature in an effort to keep the phenomena that those terms describe thoroughly suspended in the matrix of the empirical. Finally, in a chapter linking the poetry of the New York School to the art of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, I argue that these poets and artists respond in parallel ways to the models of experience associated with Abstract Expressionist painting. Johns and Rauschenberg recover the category of experience by unhooking it from the language of self, soul, and expression with which it had long been associated and resituating it in the world of material objects, including the human body.