During a career in which he has been reviled by traditionalists,
championed by W. H. Auden, hailed as the eminence grise of
postmodernism, named as successor to Wallace Stevens and carried off
every major literary prize, John Ashbery has been many poets to many
people.
His startling work alternately (and sometimes simultaneously) playful
and recondite, affirms poetry's power to astonish, to tackle
fundamentals and to engage the reader on the deepest level.
Drawn from the work he published up to 1984, from the spare, beautiful
lyrics of Some Trees and the disjunctive experimentalism of The Tennis
Court Oath, to the power meditations on subjectivity of Self-Portrait in
a Convex Mirror, Houseboat Days and A Wave, this edition of John
Ashbery's Selected Poems makes a wide range of this poet's writing
available.