"THEY DREAM ONLY OF AMERICA / TO BE LOST AMONG THE THIRTEEN MILLION PILLARS OF GRASS": SIGNED BY ASHBERY

ASHBERY, John. The Tennis Court Oath. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, (1962). Octavo, original grey cloth, original dust jacket. $1500.

First edition, signed by Ashbery on the title page.

Ashbery spent the better part of the years 1955-1965 living in France, making ends meet working as an art critic for various journals. "What did this deliberate isolation, this secession from audience, from native language, from America, mean for the poetry? It meant the possibility of The Tennis Court Oath. The poems of that book are, by general critical consensus, the most radically experimental in the Ashbery oeuvre . . . Ashbery has said that his isolation in France, including his isolation from American speech, contributed to the need to undertake the project" (Archambeau, "Tennis Court Oaths: France and the Making of John Ashbery," in Prelude Magazine, Issue 2).

The dramatic and surprising stylistic break from the quiet lyricism of Ashbery's previous book, Some Trees—which won the 1955 Yale Series of Younger Poets prize—vexed some critics, such as John Simon, who quipped in The Hudson Review that "Mr. Ashbery has perfected his verse to the point where it never deviates into—nothing so square as sense!—sensibility, sensuality, or sentences." Other critics teased out aesthetic and intellectual merits in the book. Brian Read writes in the Journal of Foreign Languages and Cultures that Ashbery "takes 'passions,' the surges and fluxes of his interior life, and pares them down and 'divides' them into 'tiniest units,' mere shards, rubble, that he then gives freely to his readers. . . . The 'passions' themselves are 'locked away' in favor of their synonyms, that is, their linguistic substitutes and displacements, which then function generatively, as 'states of creation,' moods or dispositions that are productive, that move audiences to read further, to seek further sensation and discovery, to savor the vertiginous queer affect that the words on the page enact and convey." Writing in Conjunctions, Peter Straub recalled his excitement upon first reading The Tennis Court Oath: "That effect was well-nigh galvanic. The book was radically different from anything I had ever read: really, the ruling aesthetic radically differed from any previous conception I'd had of what poetry was or could do, which means that it had next to no contact with everything I had been taught about poetry in university English departments. In fact, The Tennis Court Oath very consciously overturned the way I, and many other people, had been taught to read poetry and think about it. This was completely liberating." Contains the frequently anthologized poem "'They Dream Only of America.'"

Book fine, dust jacket extremely good with mild wear to corners and spine ends, toning to spine.