SOURCE: "On the Virtues of Modesty: John Ashbery's Tactics against Transcendence," in Modern Language Quarterly, Vol. XLII, No. 1, March, 1981, pp. 65-84.

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 Ashbery provides our belated time an ars poetica most notable for its determined modesty. Poetry may be "grace," as our mild-mannered poet comes to assert in his recent long poem, "Litany," but it is a grace that neither seeks nor delivers that chimerical Romantic transcendence which remains the preoccupation of many of our best poets and critics alike today. Writing cannot "transcend life, " Ashbery tells us in "Litany," precisely because "it is both / Too remote and too near. " Writing is at the same time removed from life, from "what continues," and yet part of it, part of the ongoingness of...