John Ashbery offers the reader a sort of Pilgrim's Progress [in Houseboat Days]: one may indulge with him in the frivolities of Vanity Fair, or one may follow his very rigorous trains of thought about the nature of modern poetry itself. (p. 118)

This reader prefers the Roman side of Ashbery to the Rococo, for when he tries his hand at political bread and circuses, there is about it something sinister and arrogant. He nabokovs us, with a wild goose chase after the likes of Daffy Duck or a glut of the sugary confections of "Valentine." The gyrations of "Pyrography" grate less, but it's still a pastiche of Americana—a papier-mâché carousel. Ashbery takes his busman's holiday—it would seem—as a necessary escape from the stern task he has set himself.

To the persistent reader John Ashbery reveals himself as a poet of high moral seriousness, an epistemological poet no less, whose work explores the modes, limits, and grounds of true knowledge, and if he can help it, he really doesn't budge from this stance. It's hard work for him to clear away the tangles of language and root out old habits, so that the wood can be seen for the trees, and it's hard work for us, but rewarding, to read this sort of cultivated verse. It hones the mind. Ashbery discloses a moral stance similar to that of a Stoic…. With stringent logic he accents the given: "What is, is what happens." We are condemned to live in the present and also in mutability…. He purifies his verse with this cold fact, chews it over, and achieves his clear flow of thought by means of and around the impediment. Demosthenes-in-training stopping his mouth up with pebbles could do no better…. It's a difficult thing for him, letting the past go. He will despite himself keep trying to warm the past up, trifling with its leftovers, waffling through "Drame Bourgeoise."… In "Collective Dawns" he finds the known-now infinitely preferable to either the Wordsworthian "mill-pond of chill doubt" or the glacier fraught with the loud notes of the cuckoo. (pp. 118-19)

Sometimes his "long spiralling afternoons" barley-sugar into Wallace Stevens' forget-me-not time and the poetry melts into a mush of allusions…. Better Ashbery should fight his own battle with modern means and square up to the twentieth-century embarrassment of being awash in time's flux yet stuck inexorably in the present…. A secure foothold in the ooze, an ethical stance eludes him. He has the planks—the means of saying things—but no platform…. This bailing out of the present, rescuing the known, channeling the flood, salvaging the language, and refusing to bog down in the slough of despond—in sum his poetical labors—makes the experiencing of his work worth-while. Ashbery is a poet, not a philosopher. No original thinker, he builds his edifices out of philosophical driftwood: "A handful of things we know for sure." Moreover he tub-thumps. The dogged craftsmanship makes his poetry watertight, feasible—yare. Afloat. Without self-advertisement yet ambitiously, he reconstructs a great variety of new forms from the old timber, offering us a Pindaric ode in the elegiac mode ("Two Deaths"), occasion poems, fifteenline sonnets, a Romantic ballad based on the "Nut-Brown Maid," a Horatian pastoral, and a mock epic ("Melodic Trains").

Generally speaking, poems could be said to beg to be dissected, their choice bits set aside to be savored later. These poems are built to repel critical evaluation. It's boring to mull over their separate parts most of which are ready-mades, trouvaille, casual remarks, cliché—that sort of thing. Furthermore, if the would-be critic pulls out one unit of thought the rest of the stack threatens collapse. Again most poetry, unlike prose, while it may not necessarily invite it almost always admits paraphrase. These poems seek to explain themselves, to argue from initial premises about the uses and abuses of poetry itself. Criticism uncomfortably housed next door is all but reduced to finding analogies among the neighboring arts.

The syntactical use of long lines of interlacing preformed phrases like chords of music rather than single notes does lead one to make musical analogies. The idea of a movement that catches one up, sweeps one along, and ends in the abandonment of the project to silence is also very similar…. "Syringa" for all its wit is a poem in a minor key. It's a pastoral tragicomedy starring Orpheus with the great Apollo making a guest appearance, Eurydice in a cameo role, and a chorus line of scholars. The word-music on this occasion plaits threads of thought, strings of words, strands of comments into a raveling and unraveling argument for a revival of the occasion poem. This happens but with the Ashberyian addition of a disclaimer: one cannot isolate a single occasion…. "Syringa" is a poem-picture of "flowing, scenery," the latter being how it must be written now, as a kind of film script perhaps? Anyway "Syringa" is very much a Restoration piece suitably witty, droll, and stylish. Orpheus apotheosized as a "bluish cloud with white contours" hovers above it all. No pedagogical centaurs appear, but out of the horse's mouth we learn about the nature of its reality…. Along the way in this book Ashbery jettisons a deal of poetic ballast. Emblems remain, some alliteration and similes are suffered because of their satiric uses. Metaphor, which doubles the mind back into itself and its recollections of other times, things, etc., and synaesthesia, which does this in triplicate, are discouraged. The manufacture of the text itself becomes very important.

These poems celebrate things man-made, the artificial. Nature barely appears and then only in pastoral or theatrical garb. Tissue-paper clouds are at hand and their artificiality has more substance and is longer lasting and more reassuring than the hot-air cumulonimbus variety that one infers hover above us out of reach…. Not only can Ashbery never leave Plato's cave in search of anything, let alone the ineffable, but the shadows on the cavern promise to be more rewarding and more real and readily available than whatever might lie outside. The most grubby dubious artifice offers us more, unashamedly, than all of Mother Nature's elusive offerings. (pp. 119-23)

The aesthetics of this seem to be mannerist eighteenth-century stuff. We make art and it styles things for us. As far as the politics of it goes, Ashbery nurses the Romantic hope that in a man-made or man-defined world everything and anything is possible: "what continues / Does so with our participation and consent." In this, Ashbery's houseboat chugs along in Shelley's splendid wake. Ashbery lines his more ascetic poems with this roseate insulation as wadding however temporary against the gathering chill outside.

The idea nests well in that stylistic box of necessary tricks, the theater: an edifice and an occasion which traps time within itself…. Theatrical time encapsulates one in an ever-present now…. The dry spots in Houseboat Days tend to be little theaters in [this] sense. Rooms, trains, boats, barrels going over Niagara provide not only a carapace against time's corrosions but a cocoon as well where there is room enough and time to gather one's wits and to reflect on events speeded up outside in an Einsteinian-tram-in-Zurich sense. The way time moves his Show Boats along makes Ashbery a modern. It also relates him to the English Romantics, who were ever conscious of the passage and the ways of time. The manner in which he erects facades as poetical shoring against outside realities seems to indicate neo-Augustan as a label. Style bars its door against time. It hobnobs with tradition—a very different thing. The Romantics undertook one-way journeys but not shielded from the elements. Ashbery prefers to take day excursions as a tourist. At heart, one feels, he is urbane, cultivated, a gentleman poet writing for gentlemen—a Restoration man. (pp. 123-24)