“The Blind Dread of Physical Pain”

This chapter puts Edith Wharton’s insistence on pain’s refining power and her disdain for her pain-averse contemporaries in dialogue with the eclectic New Thought movement, which persuaded many Americans that a positive mental outlook could minimize or even vanquish pain. Wharton openly disdained the national faith in self-improvement, attainable happiness, and avoidable pain espoused in the optimistic bestseller, Pollyanna, and by New Thinkers like Ella Wheeler Wilcox. Although she carefully distinguishes between “sterile” and potentially fruitful pain, Wharton depicts an instinctive aversion to pain of all kinds as an all-too-common American flaw, whose only upside was allowing the select few capable of an unusually sensitive appreciation of pain to stand out from the crowd. Rather than positioning these rare sensitive souls as potential models, her writings increasingly rely on them to bring the extent of US cultural and political debasement into sharper relief.

Out of the Endless Bathos

This chapter surveys the “other tradition” within Ashbery’s oeuvre: “bad” poetry. It argues that Ashbery’s courting of “badness”—understood, in quotation marks, to refer to intentional failure, or what Susan Sontag calls “the good taste of bad taste” in “Notes on Camp”—mounts a critique of the very foundations of value judgment in the arts. Ashbery’s “bad” nature poems, in particular, overturn normative standards of value established by the New Criticism and replace them with a “new bathos” that also evades avant-garde norms of experimental rigor. “Bad” nature poems such as “Variations, Calypso, and Fugue on a Theme of Ella Wheeler Wilcox” and “I Saw No Need” transform the kitschy nature of so many conventional nature poems into an object of potent critique, allowing Ashbery to write against and to “queer” the avant-garde fantasy that art can become nature.