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 poet has been on offer to John Ashbery." Countless other critics have registered similar judgments. And as if all that were not enough, the government of the United States commissioned Ashbery to write a poem for the bicentennial. Ashbery responded, with all due mockery, with "Pyrography."…

Ashbery's famous "difficulty" … has not seemed to pose an obstacle to his acclaim. This is partially due, no doubt, to the cachet difficult poems have had recently (the less one understands a poem, the better it must be), but mainly to his incredible perseverance: Ashbery's latest book, Shadow Train, is his tenth in under twenty years. His seemingly immaculately planned career is, as he says in two telling lines from a poem in this book, "too...