John Ashbery Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Vernon Shetley

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 his work. This collection … marks another peculiar twist in a protean career, another of the seemingly willful swerves from his natural pre-dispositions that discomfit his admirers almost as much as his detractors. Ashbery's previous book, As We Know, while it contained a number of poems as brief as one line apiece, nevertheless presented him in one of his freest, most expansive moods, particularly in "Litany," a poem long and discursive by almost any standards. Shadow Train comes then as something of a counter-move to the magnificent sprawl of "Litany," a book rigidly suited up in an unvaried form, a steady march of quatrains through fifty poems on pages numbered I through 50. Ashbery has never shown a particular...
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