THE TENNIS COURT OATH by John Ashbery (INSCRIBED by Ashbery)

Wesleyan University Press, 1968, First edition, third printing, 94 pp., 6 1/8" X 8 1/8", Hardcover

Fine book in a very good jacket (INSCRIBED by Ashbery)   3//4" closed tear to top of dj spine along with some general soiling and handling (see photos)

The Tennis Court Oath was published when Ashbery resided in France and worked as an art critic for the New York Herald Tribune European and for Art International of Zurich. The book received few and negative reviews upon its original publication and now sits as one of the touchstones of contemporary avant-garde poetry.

"On one level, 'The Tennis Court Oath' is a poem about the possibilities of poetry itself. For John Ashbery, the purpose of poetry is not communication in the sense of a message delivered or of an idea expressed. It is, instead, communication as the continuous encounter between ideas and things in language on the page and in language in the mind. In the fragmentary rhetoric of this poem, one can never be certain whether a given word is the object of one verb or the subject of the next. One does not know what to subordinate to what, just as one cannot determine plot from subplot or reality from dream in the inconstant landscape of the poem’s progress. For Ashbery, this indeterminacy represents the liberation of poetry from poetic precedent, a chance for the poem to be read only by its own and its readers’ own lights. The poem becomes an exemplary act of literary sabotage, a bomb tossed into the anthologies that readers carry in their minds from one work of literature to another."