A little literary thread-weaving: James and Ashbery

Although David Plante's Becoming a Londoner  (our newest third-Wednesday anthology selection, which we first dipped into last night) has, overall, underwhelmed me thus far, I would like to highlight a couple of passages here that do resonate with me quite powerfully.

On both occasions when we discussed John Ashbery's Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror  collection last year, I commented that while the meaning of his poems eludes me more often than not, I have never doubted there was something significant therein.  Not an original observation, I hasten to add, but at least I'm in good company, per this passage from Plante (pp. 105-106; italics are mine):

John Ashbery has sent us a copy of the kind of publication that proliferates, mimeographed typewritten pages stapled together, this with a large black and white photograph of John on the cover, barefoot and walking near a seaside beach with bathers, the text called
"The New Spirit":

I thought that if I could put it all down, that would be one way. And next the thought came to me that to leave it all out, would be another, and truer way.

Reading, I found that, although I didn't understand what the text was about, I became more and more engaged in the writing, and I was reminded of what John said when he came to supper, that he was trying to write a Jamesian text that left out everything James would have included, character, setting, plot, for the way the Jamesian prose in itself enchants.  Even in reading a James novel it happens that I don't know what is going on but I am sustained by the wonderfully elaborate and always inventive prose.

Plante then quotes Gertrude Stein's discussion of James in her What Is English Literature, which I won't reproduce here but is worth reading.
He then ends with this:

What rises above and floats from John's poetry, it seems to me, is some sense of meaning without my knowing what the meaning is, but the sense engages me enough to make me wonder, that wonder in itself enough to keep me reading.

And speaking/writing of Henry James: My favorite passage so far in Plante's diaries (we've only read the first third of the book) is his description (pp. 132-135) of attending the ceremony where Henry James was added to Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey.  (As is his approach throughout the diaries, Plante does not give the date, but it was June 17, 1976.)  In large part because Plante gets out of his own way (and the reader's) and just narrates, it is a lovely tour de force.