"There is the view that poetry should improve your life. I think people confuse it with the Salvation Army"
About this Quote
Ashbery lands the punch with a shrug: if you come to poetry expecting self-help, you have mistaken the genre for a charity drive. The line works because it refuses the most common defense offered on art’s behalf - that it’s good for you. Instead, he weaponizes a deadpan comparison to the Salvation Army, an institution whose mission is literal uplift: food, shelter, redemption-by-service. Poetry, in Ashbery’s view, doesn’t owe you any of that, and the expectation that it should is a category error dressed up as moral seriousness.
The intent is partly protective. Ashbery spent a career making poems that resist paraphrase and glide away from tidy lessons. When readers or critics demand “improvement,” they’re really demanding compliance: clarity, uplift, an ethically legible takeaway. His joke exposes how that demand smuggles in a punitive standard for art, where difficulty becomes a failure of character rather than a deliberate aesthetic.
The subtext is also a jab at American pragmatism, the cultural reflex to ask what something is for. Poetry’s value, he implies, isn’t that it repairs your life like a social program; it’s that it expands the kinds of attention you can pay, including to confusion, pleasure, and stray thought. In the late-20th-century context - amid confessional sincerity, workshop craft talk, and the growing pressure to justify the humanities in measurable outcomes - Ashbery’s quip is a refusal to turn poems into pamphlets. He’s not dismissing compassion; he’s insisting that art’s conscience is not the same as its utility.
The intent is partly protective. Ashbery spent a career making poems that resist paraphrase and glide away from tidy lessons. When readers or critics demand “improvement,” they’re really demanding compliance: clarity, uplift, an ethically legible takeaway. His joke exposes how that demand smuggles in a punitive standard for art, where difficulty becomes a failure of character rather than a deliberate aesthetic.
The subtext is also a jab at American pragmatism, the cultural reflex to ask what something is for. Poetry’s value, he implies, isn’t that it repairs your life like a social program; it’s that it expands the kinds of attention you can pay, including to confusion, pleasure, and stray thought. In the late-20th-century context - amid confessional sincerity, workshop craft talk, and the growing pressure to justify the humanities in measurable outcomes - Ashbery’s quip is a refusal to turn poems into pamphlets. He’s not dismissing compassion; he’s insisting that art’s conscience is not the same as its utility.
Quote Details
| Topic | Poetry |
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