Writing a Dissertation is Boring

"The poems in which Diggory cannot seem to find political content are, in fact, teeming with it, though it is often inextricably bound with issues of aesthetics. These aesthetic choices, some of which place a high value upon humor, disjunctiveness, and violent rearrangement of accepted ways of making meaning, are in themselves political insofar as they interrogate, disrupt, and make fun of the methods and work of the establishment. The New York School did not reject politics in favor of aesthetics; they rejected prevailing notions of what it meant to be political, and instead made poetic choices that would indeed turn out to have political consequences not only for their generation but for those following. Ashbery and O’Hara’s habit of dodging questions of politics or meaning, or flatly disavowing an interest in the political is merely another way of rejecting the status quo of Eisenhower America."