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The paper focuses on John Ashbery’s fourth volume, The Double Dream of Spring. Published in 1970, The Double Dream of Spring was written following Ashbery’s return to the USA from France. The book is marked by topographical and linguistic dislocations and by a repeated questioning of the idea of home. The paper reads The Double Dream of Spring through and against Charles Olson’s ideas of poetic space. Ashbery’s close engagement with the work of Giorgio de Chirico (from whom the volume takes its title) is shown to allow him to formulate a way of thinking about space that does not depend, as Olson’s spatial thinking does, on an allegiance to place. Ashbery’s abstracted language provides a way of conceiving topographies and environments that does not presuppose prior familiarity. The Double Dream of Spring thus provides a way of thinking about human movement, about the pleasures (to use Wallace Stevens’ great phrase) of merely circulating.

David Herd teaches at the University of Kent where he directs the Centre for Modern Poetry. He is the author of John Ashbery and American Poetry and Enthusiast! Essays on Modern American Literature. His poetry includes Rote-Through, (a book-length collaboration with Simon Smith) and All Just (forthcoming).
Contact: kate.lilley@sydney.edu.au