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In John Ashbery's haunting 1992 collection, just as in the traveler's experience of a hotel, we recognize everything, and yet nothing is familiar-not even ourselves Hotel Lautréamont invites readers to reimagine a book of poems as a collection of hotel rooms: each one empty until we enter it, and yet in truth abundantly furnished with associations, necessities, and echoes of both the known and the alien. The collection's title poem is itself an evocative echo: Comte de Lautréamont was the pseudonym taken by Isidore-Lucien Ducasse, a radical nineteenth-century French writer about whom little is known except that he produced one remarkable presymbolist epic prose poem called The Songs of Maldoror and died of fever at the age of twenty-four in a hotel in Paris during Napoleon III's siege of the city in 1870. Addressed to lonely ghosts, lingering guests, and others, the poems in Hotel Lautréamont present a study of exile, loss, meaning, and the artistic constructions we create to house them.
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Reviews
"The career of a great writer must be one of constant self-renewal, and [Hotel Lautréamont] provides evidence of [Ashbery's] continuing poetic development. The epic intent of his previous volume, Flow Chart, has been replaced here by the more characteristic mood of his lyrics and elegies; but these are shorter poems which display an increased command of language and of form. Stemming in part from
Peter Ackroyd, The Times Literary Supplement
"Like Emerson's essay 'Experience,' these poems lament that the magnitude of what we feel is so much less than the magnitude of our losses. . . . And for all the talk by academic critics of difficulty in his work, Mr. Ashbery is extremely forgiving, a poet, like Wordsworth, of superb passages who doesn't insist that one dig out the gold in every line. His virtuosity is amiable, never affecting to
Peter Ackroyd, The Times Literary Supplement
"No poet is more surreal, more disjunctive and musical, more subtly allusive (note the nod to Stevens in 'It Must Be Sophisticated') than John Ashbery. In Hotel Lautréamont he is also tremendously funny. You don't have to understand these poems to love them; you need only that suspension of disbelief that constitutes an audience's pleasure before the magician's flourishes and wonders."
Michael Dirda, TheWashington Post Book World