本文沿用三個近代的文學批評方法：倫理、唯物史觀與書本位理論，來理解美國詩人約翰‧阿什伯里的作品，並帶入一動態的關係。藉由互文性地閱讀阿什 伯里的《群星閃耀》（1994 年），其出自於他最乏人研究的晚期生涯，以達到前述 目標。我對此書的分析由確立HIV 愛滋病的存在開始，其在書中做為一種被嚴謹 揭示的文化及政治主題。接著，本文探討阿什伯里如何在書中反駁對同性戀死亡 宿命論式與詆毀性質的描述；藉由哲學家Gabriele Taylor 稱作一種「有建設性的」、負面的、「自我檢視的情緒，以作為世上一個行動者的觀點出發」。隨後，本文會利用一小段落將阿什伯里的道德自我審問和休‧奧登（W. H. Auden）所提出的倖存者的愧疚感。最後，本文會對此書的long title poem 進行周密的文本分析。透過援引阿什伯里與對其歐洲先賢，阿蒂爾‧蘭波（Arthur Rimbaud）的論 述，更精確地來說，是蘭波被詹明信（Fredric Jameson）歷史化的作品《彩圖集》， 此段呈現了對於被愛滋病橫掃的世界的道德立場，是如何影響阿什伯里去重思中產階級在當時這場全球性災難中所應擔負的責任。相較於Christopher Nealon 認為1970 年代的阿什伯里身為一個詩人，隨機式地從資本主義經濟盛況與災難抽身，此篇評論提供了不同面像的觀點。我認為阿什伯里1994 年的作品借用了「蘭波式意象」裡使用的le bonheur 概念（代表一個中產階級既平靜又躁動的矛盾處境）來挑戰自己與讀者長久以來和資本主義拖延及消費文化的歷史關聯。藉此，本文尤其延伸了Aidan Wasley 對阿什伯里的評鑑，並強調何者在他的詩篇中是道德上重要且具政治性的。

This article brings into a dynamic relationship and extends three recent critical approaches to the American poet John Ashbery—approaches which may be termed ethical, historical-materialist, and book-centered. It does so through an intertextual reading of a particular poetry volume, And the Stars Were Shining (1994), from a so far insufficiently examined later phase of Ashbery’s career. My analysis of this book begins by establishing HIV/AIDS as a discreetly revealed cultural and political theme within the volume. It moves on to consider the manner in which Ashbery’s book opposes fatalistic and denigrating depictions of homosexual death with a version of what the philosopher Gabriele Taylor calls the constructive negative “emotions of self-assessment from the point of view of being an agent in the world.” After a short section linking Ashbery’s moral interrogation with a form of survivor’s guilt found in W. H. Auden, the final part of the article provides a close textual analysis of several sections of the book’s long title poem. Drawing on Ashbery’s dealings with his European forbear, Arthur Rimbaud—more specifically, the latter’s Illuminations, as historicized by Fredric Jameson—this section demonstrates the way in which the moral stance toward the world inaugurated at the scene of the HIV/AIDS disaster contributes to Ashbery’s reimagining of bourgeois responsibilities in a time of global harm. The argument provides a different perspective from Christopher Nealon’s view of the 1970s Ashbery as a poet turning arbitrarily away from spectacles of accumulation and disaster. I argue that Ashbery’s 1994 work borrows the Rimbaldian image of “le bonheur” (representing a paradoxical bourgeois condition of calm and instability) to challenge himself and his reader in their intimate historical relation to a culture of deferral and consumption. In this way, the article augments evaluations of Ashbery, notably Aidan Wasley’s, emphasizing the morally serious and political aspect in his poetry.