If one word had to be used to describe John Ashbery's poetry, it would have to be that it is difficult--difficult to read, difficult to understand, and sometimes difficult to like. His admirers and de...
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In a 1961 piece for ArtNews on the murmuring intimacy of Henri Michaux's work, John Ashbery singled out this statement of Michaux's aims: Instead of one vision which excludes others, I would have like...
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In the following essay, Zweig commends Ashbery's use of hermetic language.
I read each new book by John Ashbery with the same puzzlement and fascination. Ashbery's finely tuned style nev...
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In the following review, Meyer provides a laudatory assessment of Hotel Lautréamont and And the Stars Were Shining.
For upwards of two decades now, since the acclaim that greeted his 1975 colle...
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In the following essay, Norton analyzes Ashbery's verse in relationship to the major modes of linguistic theory and philosophy, in particular contemporary gay theory.
The meaning of a word is ...
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In the following excerpt, Moramarco discusses the poetry of John Ashbery and Frank O'Hara in light of the Abstract Expressionist movement in American painting
"Insight, if it is occasio...
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In the following essay, Kalstone traces the thematic and stylistic development of Ashbery's verse.
In 1972 John Ashbery was invited to read at Shiraz, in Iran, where for several years the Empre...
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In the following excerpt, Schulman explores the defining characteristics of Ashbery's visionary poetry
"From this I shall evolve a man,"1 Wallace Stevens wrote of the mind'...
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In the following positive review, Yeaton praises linguistic aspects of "Litany."
Imagine, a sixty-five page poem written in two columns to be read simultaneously. That means you can�...
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In the following essay, Fite analyzes the opaque nature of Ashbery's verse, viewing it as an important aspect in the development of the poet's "aesthetic strategy."
John As...
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In the following essay, Costello explores the relationship between author and reader in Ashbery's verse.
"My way is, to conjure you"—Epilogue, As You Like It
It has been ...
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In the following essay, Fink explores the role of humor in Ashbery's verse.
Although John Ashbery's poems seldom cause even his most devoted readers to double over in laughter, his work ...
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In the following interview, Ashbery discusses influences on his work, his creative process, and his poetic philosophy.
[Munn]: Besides writing poetry, what are your current projects?
[Ashbery]: I was ...
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Critical Essay by Harold Bloom
I cannot avoid the judgment that the year's best book of poems is Ashbery's Houseboat Days…. The modish eccentricities that once weakly defended thi...
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Critical Essay by Richard Howard
Most of the poems in Houseboat Days which I can make out at all are … deliberations on the meaning of the present tense, its exactions and falsifications, its p...
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Critical Essay by David Kalstone
Familiar notions about a poet's development won't quite apply to Ashbery's work. He doesn't return to objects, figures and key incidents wh...
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Critical Essay by Peter Stitt
Ashbery is generally viewed as such a radical innovator, so thoroughly nouveau a poet, that perhaps the most surprising thing is how little his methods have changed durin...
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Critical Essay by Rosemary Johnson
John Ashbery offers the reader a sort of Pilgrim's Progress [in Houseboat Days]: one may indulge with him in the frivolities of Vanity Fair, or one may follow...
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Critical Essay by Harold Bloom
Ashbery's resource has been to make a music of the poignance of withdrawal. So, in [As You Came from the Holy Land], the "end of any season" that co...
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Critical Essay by Charles Molesworth
The first few books by John Ashbery contained a large proportion of a poetry of inconsequence. Borrowing freely from the traditions of French surrealism, and from ...
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Critical Essay by Calvin Bedient
The manner [of "Fantasia on 'The Nut-Brown Maid'" in Houseboat Days] defies the matter. It is itself a "new season," a joyful...
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Critical Essay by Jonathan Holden
John Ashbery is the first American poet to successfully carry out the possibilities of analogy between poetry and "abstract expressionist" painting. He ...
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Critical Essay by Henry M. Sayre
[Much modern poetry shows a predilection for weak closure of line, an open-endedness which] values the "natural" (or its illusion) over the artful, the o...
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Critical Essay by Edmund White
For a number of years John Ashbery has been tackling the long poem…. [In] As We Know Ashbery has come up with his most original solution to this technical problem...
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Critical Essay by Harold Bloom
John Ashbery's [As We Know] is certainly his most ambitious [collection]; it may even be his best so far. My tentativeness stems from its being two books at once....
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Critical Essay by David Bromwich
Poets define their own historical moment by exhibiting their allegiance to some historical myth. John Ashbery … has chosen the myth of the Golden Age. Such an a...
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Critical Essay by Denis Donoghue
On a first reading [of "Litany"] I read the left-hand monologue complete, all three sections, without even adverting to what was happening on the right-h...
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In the following essay, Clark offers critical analysis of the poem "The Wave." According to Clark, "Ashbery's poetry is distinguished by an enigmatic style which privileges...
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In the following review, Blasing offers favorable assessment of Flow Chart. Drawing parallels to the Romantic poetry of William Wordsworth, Blasing concludes, "Flow Chart is a very entertaining...
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In the following essay, Zinnes discusses Ashbery's literary career, poetic style, central motifs, and the influence of avant-garde music and art on his work.
Writing about John Ashbery is diffi...
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In the following review, Reilly offers tempered praise for Flow Chart. According to Reilly, Flow Chart represents "an endless flow of disrupted ruminations, literary fragments, pseudo-conversat...
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In the following essay, Kevorkian explores the interactive relationship between Ashbery and his critics. According to Kevorkian, Ashbery's poetry reveals a pattern of "revenge" an...
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In the following review, Bedient offers tempered praise for And the Stars Were Shining, though he notes that this volume is "not one of his strongest."
John Ashbery famously has all the ...
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In the following review, Clover offers favorable assessment of And the Stars Were Shining.
The risk of falling into oneself, of disappearing inside the welter of strategies and signifiers aggregately ...
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In the following review, Meyer provides critical analysis of Hotel Lautréamont and And the Stars Were Shining.
For upwards of two decades now, since the acclaim that greeted his 1975 collection...
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Critical Essay by David Shapiro
[The observations in Shapiro's essay are based substantially on interviews with John Ashbery, 1964–72.]
Ashbery was a connoisseur of [the French author Ra...
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Critical Essay by Helen Vendler
It seems time to write about John Ashbery's subject matter…. It is Ashbery's style that has obsessed reviewers, as they alternately wrestle with it...
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Critical Essay by David Young
[Shadow Train] is endearing and exasperating in the same ways that all of Ashbery's poetry is. It reflects his great strengths as a writer: endless inventiveness, ...
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Critical Essay by Phoebe Pettingell
[Shadow Train] is a sustained experiment with a new short form…. In the past, Ashbery's lyrical strengths were best exemplified by his long poems, but...
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Critical Essay by Roberta Berke
If the New York poets are each as individual as New York taxi drivers, then with Frank O'Hara at the wheel we cruise through Greenwich Village with occasional si...
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Critical Essay by Dana Gioia
Shadow Train will change no one's mind about Ashbery's merits as a poet. His admirers will praise the new-found discipline and concentration in this collecti...
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Critical Essay by Robert Richman
Helen McNeil, a British critic writing in the Times Literary Supplement, has said that "since the death of Robert Lowell, the title of most important American p...
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Critical Essay by Vernon Shetley
[One] might caution the reader that Shadow Train is by no means the best place to start in reading Ashbery, as it occupies a curious position in the evolving body of h...
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John (Lawrence) Ashbery
