“The Malady of Ideality”: Mallarmé’s Igitur in John Ashbery’s “Fragment”

This essay argues that John Ashbery’s long poem “Fragment” (1965) dramatizes an encounter between two poeticphilosophical traditions: the first is represented by William Wordsworth and William James and the second by Stéphane Mallarmé, whose dramatic tale Igitur Ashbery had been translating as he composed the poem. While a central principle of the first tradition is what James calls “continuity of experience,” Mallarmé’s work allows Ashbery to test his impulse toward an extremity of poetic vision in which the world of experience is eclipsed by a sublime Idea.