John Ashbery is the first American poet to successfully carry out the possibilities of analogy between poetry and "abstract expressionist" painting. He has succeeded so well for two reasons: he is the first poet to identify the correct correspondences between painting and writing; he is the first poet to explore that analogy who has possessed the skill to produce a first-rate "abstract-expressionist" poetry, a poetry which is as beautiful and sturdy as the paintings of Willem de Kooning….

[It] is perhaps Ashbery's work as an editor, his ability to write good prose, which lends the paragraphs of his verse their architectonic quality, a relentless sense of being "about" something specific, of moving toward some point which, like the end of a rainbow, always just eludes us. In an Ashbery poem, we feel this mainly because the syntax of his sentences is so "reasonable" sounding, so adeptly connected over...