ABSTRACT
Ashbery, faced three forms of alienation in his foundational years, having to do with his sexuality, his relation to productive labor, and his status as a poet in midcentury America. In the face of such alienation, he turns for solace to the world of aesthetic experience. This initial attraction to aesthetic experience was magnified when he joins an artistic milieu in 1940s/1950s New York City, a surprisingly small world that emphasized the autonomy of the art object and put the medium of art at the center of aesthetic production. Ashbery followed this turn to the medium. His diffidence regarding politics, moralism, or didacticism is the result of a particular social formation and provides a means for him to express—at the level of form—his social and sexual alienation.
