SOURCE: "Ashbery: Poet for All Seasons," in Raritan, Vol. XV, No. 2, Fall, 1995, pp. 144-61.

For upwards of two decades now, since the acclaim that greeted his 1975 collection Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, John Ashbery has been the United States' preeminent poet, with books selling in the tens of thousands, both at home and abroad. In a recent issue of the British journal PN Review, two dozen poets and critics set out to "appraise the mark this American writer" has made and continues to make in Britain—a mark, we are told, that differs appreciably from his influence in the United States. Among the sources of Ashbery's widespread popularity is a feature of his work that he does not share with other contemporary writers and which might therefore account for some of his individual appeal. This is a quite exceptional openness to the influence of earlier writers, especially the first two generations of this century's English-speaking poets. It is this continuity with the poets largely responsible for making modern poetry consequential for readers today that makes Ashbery so recognizably a poet of consequence himself.

Along with his receptivity to the work of other poets, Ashbery exhibits an equal willingness to draw on the unexpected turns of demotic speech, with which most readers are no doubt more familiar than they are with the tropes of poetry. In poem after poem he demonstrates that everyday usage contains as much grist for poetry as poetry itself does. In adapting the language he finds around him, whether the language of poets or of personal and social life, Ashbery applies a technique that one finds described exactly, if somewhat outrageously, by Isidore Ducasse, the nineteenth-century French writer who called himself the Comte de Lautréamont. "Plagiarism is necessary," Ducasse wrote: "it is implied in the idea of progress. It clasps an author's sentence tight, uses his expressions, eliminates a false idea, replaces it with the right idea." Few writers have been as assiduous, or as unembarrassed, in their pursuit of the bon mot as Ashbery, who would have had to look no further than Auden and Stevens and Eliot to find exemplary plagiarists.

Indeed, the title of Ashbery's 1992 collection, Hotel Lautréamont—in deliberate contrast with Rimbaud's "Splendide-Hotel," "erected," as Rimbaud has it, in the splendid isolation "of ice and of polar night"—presents a trope of a man as a hotel where other people stay for a short while and then move on. This permeability of borders, and boarders, is central to Ashbery and his sense of "himself." In a crucial statement, dating from 1976, he observed that "what moves me is the irregular form—the flawed words and stubborn sounds, as Stevens said, that affect us whenever we try to say something that is important to us." It is this sense of a necessary incompleteness in poetry that he insists on, for such "irregular form" is what enables the poetry to survive the circumstances of its own composition—and so make room both for the reader and for the later poet, who is always first a reader.

Perhaps one imagined that Eliot's Four Quartets was a paragon of completeness; so Ashbery in Hotel Lautréamont offers us an additional "Quartet." Similarly, to complement "Ash Wednesday" we are presented with "Just Wednesday." (Ashbery, as he often does, plays on his name here, modestly removing it from Eliot's great poem. Now, just how modest is this?) Donne's "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" is transformed into "A Mourning Forbidding Valediction," in which the nine quatrains of the original poem, odd and even lines rhyming, are replaced by seven eight-line stanzas, each with the rhyme scheme abcd cbad. This magnificent poem alone is worth the purchase of the volume. And what of Stevens, whom Ashbery has called his favorite poet? The 1942 "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction," surely as great a poem as has been written in this century, consists of three parts: "It Must Be Abstract," "It Must Change," "It Must Give Pleasure." Ashbery, refusing to be silenced by these peremptory judgments, contributes his own obiter dictum: "It Must Be Sophisticated," "O what book shall I read now?" he wonders near the end of this truly wonderful poem: "for they are all of them new, and used, / when I write my name on the flyleaf."

Although he never lets one forget that one is reading poetry, not overhearing conversation, Ashbery certainly doesn't want his readers to feel that the concerns which engage him are exclusively literary and merely a matter of reading and responding to books "new, and used." In the same way, he wants his poems to speak to and for as broad a spectrum of his contemporaries as possible. Such ambitions have a precise genealogy. English-language poetry of the last two hundred years—ever since Wordsworth's insistence on using "the real language of men" rather than "the arbitrary and capricious habits of expression … frequently substituted for it by Poets"—turns on an ongoing tension between aristocratic and democratic conceptions of the reading public. Is the poetry written for the privileged few or the unexceptional many? Pound and Yeats are perhaps the most powerful modern proponents of a poetic aristocracy, which may account for Ashbery's relative lack of interest in them.

Wordsworth, in calling the volume he coauthored with Coleridge Lyrical Ballads, was responding to the late eighteenth-century revival of interest in English and Scottish ballads, a tradition of poetry that predated the Renaissance establishment of a "heightened" English and which seemed to speak for society as a whole in a way that poetry since the Renaissance had not. "Research has shown," the title poem of Hotel Lautréamont begins, in one of Ashbery's preferred manners, that of the academic spinner of clichés, "that ballads were produced by all of society / working as a team. They didn't just happen. There was no guesswork. / The people, then, knew what they wanted and how to get it. / We see the results in works as diverse as 'Windsor Forest' and 'The Wife of Usher's Well.'" The latter poem is a traditional Scottish ballad, whereas the former, an early production of Alexander Pope's, is composed in his trademark rhymed couplets. As such, it hardly qualifies as a ballad; yet, like "The Wife of Usher's Well," it invites precious little guesswork, and the forest world it portrays is the sort of "golden" world, "harmoniously confused: / Where Order in Variety we see, / And where, tho' all things differ, all agree," that can only be "produced by all of society / working as a team."

"Hotel Lautréamont" is not itself written in traditional ballad stanzas—it is rather a pantoum, an elaborate verse form of Malay origin that was introduced into French early in the nineteenth century and later adapted to English—but it testifies to the increasing importance the ballad has acquired in Ashbery's poetry. The long poem, "Fantasia on 'The Nut-Brown Maid,'" for instance, which appeared in the 1977 collection Houseboat Days, is modeled on the ballad alluded to in the title; and in the 1987 April Galleons, the poem "Forgotten Song" begins with variants of lines from several ballads and includes a passage from a third as well. In Hotel Lautréamont, besides the title poem, Ashbery has included a magical and quite-impossible-to-forget song. "The Youth's Magic Horn." Like so much of Ashbery's work of the last decade—after an almost-fatal spinal infection he experienced in 1982—this poem is a "dump" or lament at approaching death. It is divided into two sections of six quatrains each, with the much shorter second and fourth lines of each quatrain repeated throughout each section as a refrain. "First in dreams," the second section begins, " I questioned the casing of the gears the enigma presented / You're a pain in the ass my beloved/ The twa corbies belched and were gone, song veiled sky that day / I have to stop in one mile." The "twa corbies" are two ravens that, in the Scottish ballad of that name, are overheard discussing the meal they are about to make of "a new-slain knight."

It is not possible in so brief an excerpt to reproduce the beauty that emerges out of this medley of grating language and excruciating pain, since it depends on the song's cumulative effect, but the juxtaposition of dream and ballad in these lines does suggest the significance of Ashbery's concern with ballad form. The same juxtaposition is to be found in W.H. Auden's introduction to Ashbery's first book, Some Trees, which Auden selected as the 1956 winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets. Auden suggests that any poet "working with the subjective life"—particularly poets who, like Ashbery, are "concerned with the discovery that in childhood largely, in dreams and daydreams entirely, the imaginative life of the human individual stubbornly continues to live by the old magical notions"—will be "tempted to manufacture calculated oddities, as if the subjectively sacred were necessarily and on all occasions odd." Here Auden is warning Ashbery against another "youth" with a "magic horn" whose influence may readily be discerned in such poems in Some Trees as the aptly-named "Popular Songs." This poet is the younger Auden.

Whenever Ashbery, who wrote an undergraduate honors thesis on Auden, finds himself addressing the importance the older poet had for him, he always makes a point of insisting that it was the early Auden who played the decisive role, the so-called "English" Auden of the 1930s—author, among many other works, of such ballads as "O what is that sound" and "As I walked out one evening." It is not ballads like these, however, that Auden is warning Ashbery against. Rather it is the poet of the 1932 miscellany, The Orators, who is to be watched out for; and in an interview with the Paris Review in the early 1980s, Ashbery made it quite clear that the message had been received. After noting that Auden "was of two minds about my own work," he added: "You'll remember, though, that he once said in later life that one of his early works, 'The Orators,' must have been written by a madman." It was not the flamboyant discontinuities of the work, the "calculated oddities," that demonstrated the writer's madness, but the fact that in this remarkable anthology of verse and prose forms the twenty-four-year-old Auden had tried to combine the dreamlike rhetoric of "an inner mythological life" with the public formats of the ode and the ballad, or, as he titled two sections of the work, the "journal of an airman" with an "address for a prize-day."

"The problem for the modern poet, as for everyone else today," Auden suggested in 1938, shortly before he left Europe for America, "is how to find or form a genuine community." As Ashbery puts it in "Hotel Lautréamont": "It remains for us to come to terms with our commonality." The traditional ballad represents for Ashbery, as it did for Auden, the poetry of "a community united in sympathy." The central task for the modern poet, then, is to try to create works that function the way ballads do, only for a community in which the shared experience is the feeling, as Ashbery described it in 1972, of everything "slipping away from me as I'm trying to talk about it." "A sense of permanent unraveling," he has also called it. One consequence of the resulting "simultaneity of conflicting states of being" is that for the poet, attentive above all to the play of language about him, the composition of modern life takes the form of an indefinitely extended "mix" of discourses: high, low, middle, whatever.

In the summer of 1955, shortly after being notified of his selection by Auden for the Yale Series, Ashbery left New York, where he had been living since his graduation from Harvard in 1949, to spend a year in France on a Fulbright. Between 1955 and late 1965 he lived continuously in France except for the 1957-58 school year which he spent back in New York as a graduate student in French literature at N.Y.U. If, as Ashbery has suggested, French writing played a relatively small role in his "experimenting with language" during these years, this was because the major role was performed by another American who half a century earlier had made Paris her home: Gertrude Stein. Thus he observes of novelist and former Paris Match columnist Pierre Martory—whose first collection of poetry, The Landscape Is Behind The Door, translated and introduced by Ashbery, was published last year—that "his take on [things French] has something distinctly and irreverently American about it." When they met, Martory, with whom Ashbery lived during much of the decade, "was reading Emily Dickinson, Eliot and Gertrude Stein."

In a 1957 review of Stein's posthumously published Stanzas in Meditation, Ashbery described the poetry he would come to write. Only he did so by describing Stein's work:

Like people, Miss Stein's lines are comforting or annoying or brilliant or tedious. Like people, they sometimes make no sense and sometimes make perfect sense or they stop short in the middle of a sentence and wander away, leaving us alone for awhile in the physical world, that collection of thoughts, flowers, weather, and proper names. And, just as with people, there is no real escape from them…. Sometimes the story has the logic of a dream… while at other times it becomes startlingly clear for a moment, as though a change in the wind had suddenly enabled us to hear a conversation that was taking place some distance away…. In its profound originality, its original profundity, this poem that is always threatening to become a novel reminds us of the late novels of James… which seem to strain with a superhuman force toward "the condition of music."

There is no better, no more concise, description of Ashbery's subsequent poetry—despite the tremendous stylistic differences that one encounters in the thirty years of writing between his second book, The Tennis Court Oath, and Hotel Lautréamont. Ashbery includes here all the figures that he will use again and again in describing his own work: the everyday discontinuities of meaning and sentence structure, the dream-logic, the snatches of conversation, the music. These are all extrapoetic experiences that seem particularly suited to describing what he called in 1972 "the movement of experiencing" or "the experience of experience," and it was precisely this general sense of experience that he suggested fifteen years earlier was Stein's primary concern in Stanzas in Meditation. "It is usually not events which interest Miss Stein, rather it is their 'way of happening,' and the story of Stanzas in Meditation is a general, all-purpose model which each reader can adapt to fit his own set of particulars." Stein's work offered Ashbery a way of accommodating Auden's warning about confusing private dream and public ballad. Ashbery's poetry would henceforth be "about the privacy of everyone," the way experience feels to anyone.

The poems collected in The Tennis Court Oath, which like Hotel Lautréamont is dedicated to Martory, represent Ashbery's first attempts to think Stein through on his own terms, that is, in his own terms. Indeed, it is the nature of his terminology that most clearly distinguishes Ashbery from Stein. Whereas Stein, at least in Stanzas in Meditation, confined herself to "colorless connecting words such as 'where,' 'which,' 'these,' 'of,' 'not,' 'have,' 'about,' and so on" ("though now and then Miss Stein throws in an orange, a lilac, or an Albert to remind us that it really is the world, our world, that she is talking about"), Ashbery includes everything—every word and sequence of words—he can find. If Stein entertains the same range of events in her work, nonetheless she insists on using her own language: making over the received words, and in the process making the particular events as hard to discern as possible. What defines Ashbery's language as his own, by contrast, is its openness to the language of others. This is his signature. The poems are "his" because the lines are everybody's.

"Back from his breakfast, thirty-five years ago, / he stumbles, finds in the sun a nod that's new." So begins the exquisite "And Socializing"—and it is back to this era of "future memories," with its potent combination of party-going and poetry-writing, that Ashbery returns again and again in Hotel Lautréamont. The American original for this blending of the social and the poetic is, of course, the author of "Song of Myself," and on several occasions in the 1992 collection Ashbery takes the work of Whitman as his starting-point. He even stages an encounter, in "A Driftwood Altar," with the writer who so memorably identified himself as "a trail of drift and debris": "Of all those who came near him at this stage, only / a few can describe him with any certainty: a drifter / was the consensus, polite with old people, indifferent to children, extremely interested in young adults, / but so far, why remember him? And few did, / that much is certain. I caught up with him / on a back porch in Culver City, exchanged the requisite nod, / shirt biting the neck…" Whitman, it will be recalled, concluded his epoch-defining "Song" by leaving everything up in the air: "Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged, / Missing me one place search another, / I stop somewhere waiting for you."

Ashbery's references to past poetry are frequent, but they are rarely obscure. Unlike Eliot or Pound, he is not interested in impressing the reader with a vast range of esoteric knowledge. On the contrary, it is his range of common usage, the way he joins idioms that too often appear mutually exclusive, which is so impressive. He prefers to use language he can expect the reader to be relatively familiar with, so that the transformations worked on it will be recognizable. Hence the high proportion of titles and first lines in his literary allusions. The two most familiar titles in Whitman's oeuvre, for instance—Leaves of Grass, the name of the collected poems, and "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," the elegy for Lincoln—are all that a reader needs in order to grasp what Ashbery is after when, in "Notes From the Air," reference is made to "some stranger's casual words" that concern "the square of barren grass that adjoins your doorstep." Similarly, in the superb "Wild Boys of the Road," one passes directly from "the tin / posy in the doorjamb," wonderfully characterized as being "as unconcerned as if this were a hundred and fifty years ago"—as if Whitman's "poesy" had yet to be written—to the poem's final sentence which, seventy-five words long, begins "The leaves are too little at the top" and ends on the sobering note of "stone plinths with fringe of grass." The enumerative and almost infinitely expandable sentence quite literally frames the "stone plinths"—the gravestones of those Ashbery is elegizing, including himself—with perhaps the most resonant phrase in American literature: "leaves… of grass."

In speaking of the long prose poems gathered in the 1972 Three Poems, Ashbery has observed that " I would be able to write just a couple of pages at a time. I would be left with an overwhelming anxiety, not knowing whether I was ever going to be able to finish this thing or what on earth I was going to put in it." If Ashbery's poetry avoids, in Richard Howard's words, "the invoked anxiety of a closed form," there still remains the need to come up with an ending for the "open" work. Moreover, as Ashbery suggests, how to end is only half the problem; the other half is the perplexing business of just "how to continue"—which, as it happens, is the title of the final poem in Hotel Lautréamont.

"Oh there once was a woman / and she kept a shop / selling trinkets to tourists / not far from a dock / who came to see what life could be / far back on the island." So unfolds the first of the five stanzas of this song, with its parties and friends and lovers, "a marvel of poetry / and irony." The simplicity of the language, the generalized model it presents, the explicit concern with unity as well as with the contradictions of "our commonality," all these mark the poem as a contemporary ballad. As such, it is a fitting companion piece to a work like Elizabeth Bishop's "The Burglar of Babylon." Written in traditional ballad stanzas, Bishop's poem takes as its subject "the death of a Brazilian bandit in which emotionally charged ellipses build up to a tragic grandeur"—as Ashbery has put it—beginning and ending with the lines, "On the fair green hills of Rio / There grows a fearful stain: / The poor who come to Rio / And can't go home again." In the modern world the country has become part of the city, and with it has come a pressing need for something resembling the traditional ballad.

Ashbery, like Bishop, seeks to reintroduce us in his "general, all-purpose" poem to this new world in which we are all living and dying—poets and party-goers as well as the poor in the "fair green hills"—and hence to reintroduce us to one another. That is all. There is no particular message. But the poetry does have something to tell us, all the same. By its own example, it demonstrates "how to continue" much as "The Instruction Manual," in Some Trees, had done. ("As is my way, I begin to dream, resting my elbows on the desk and leaning out of the window a little, / Of dim Guadalajara! City of rose-colored flowers! / City I wanted most to see, and most did not see, in Mexico!") This is a poetry that not only instructs us to continue but shows how we may do so, even when it seems that "we are in the departure / mode": how to continue, that is, as inhabitants of what Ashbery, in a phrase entered twice in this Hotel's register, calls "our example, earth."

In his most recent collection, published last winter, Ashbery seems to have removed his attention from the earth to the stars—beginning with the title, And the Stars Were Shining. Does this mean that he has gone transcendental? I have to confess that when I first read these poems I thought that the poet, after more than forty years of gentle rigor, was finally showing signs of fatigue. The poems really did seem mechanical, as they have so often been accused of being: automatic, insubstantial, forced. I was especially confused by the twenty-four-page title poem, which consists of thirteen sections of varying lengths. These are sufficiently various that I wondered what difference it would make if they were treated as separate poems and given individual titles instead of being numbered—hence instead of being parts of the poem, "And the Stars Were Shining," merely parts of the book And the Stars Were Shining.

I mention this initial response because I suspect that it is the sort of experience which readers who distrust—and more, dislike—Ashbery's writing typically have. Needless to say, the first impression was mistaken. The writing is exactly the kind that one should, by now, have come to expect from this poet: whatever's not expected. The problem is that having learned to expect the unexpected doesn't necessarily make it any easier to accept. In the latest poems, it is the halfhearted, almost blasé, gestures that Ashbery seems intent on making which prove so deceptive, the recycled imagery of a "middle" state between life and death (stars, sea, island, dream, night). Instead of Hotel Lautréamont's fierce meditations on death—mixing acceptance and disbelief, indelicacy and despair—these poems seem merely to offer token resistance. No "purgatory of words," such as one finds in the 1991 book-length poem Flow Chart, just a couple of shining stars resting on their laurels, drinking beers and, as one is informed late in the new collection, "shooting the breeze with night and her swift promontories."

Yet "token resistance" is Ashbery's own phrase, the title of the opening poem. In his relaxed way, he's pursuing what animates the ordinary, not its elevation—in effect, bringing the stars down to earth. In a recent interview he thus observed, concerning the collection's title (which directly translates E lucevan le Stella, the aria that Cavaradossi, the painter and lover of Tosca in Puccini's opera Tosca, sings before his execution), that "one day" he had "thought of the title in Italian and thought of it being translated into English and it was kind of funny in English … a sort of unnecessary bit of information. The fact that they were shining." In Ashbery's new poetry, as in all successful poetry, the poet concentrates on what the mind hungry for information, especially information about which it can be certain, supposes to be unnecessary bits of info. The "present, with its noodle parlors / and token resistance" is still life; and to deny, or resist, this embarrassing fact is to place oneself above life, which is what Ashbery—stars and all—won't do, if he has any say in the matter.

"So must one descend from the checkered heights / that are our friends," Ashbery's poem of "token resistance" concludes: "needlessly / rehearsing what we will say / as a common light bathes us, / / a common fiction reverberates as we pass / to the celebration. Originally / we weren't going to leave home. But made bold / somehow by the rain we put our best foot forward. / / Now it's years after that. It / isn't possible to be young anymore. / Yet the tree treats me like a brute friend; / my own shoes have scarred the walk I've taken." It's not just Ashbery's shoes that have scarred this particular walk, however. "There was a time," Wordsworth's immortal Ode begins, "when meadow, grove, and stream, / The earth, and every common sight / To me did seem / Apparelled in celestial light… The Youth, who daily farther from the East / Must travel, still is Nature's Priest, / And by the vision splendid / Is on his way attended; / At length the Man perceives it die away, / And fade into the light of common day." Against Wordsworth's opposition of "common" and "celestial" Ashbery offers his token (that is to say, exemplary) resistance—collapsing the distinction in a "common light" that still leaves room for Wordsworth's "common fiction" of uncommon splendor.

Originally we weren 't going to leave home. But made bold somehow by the rain we put our best foot forward. Now it's years after that. It isn 't possible to be young anymore. This is Wordsworth's and Ashbery's common predicament. Where they part company is in their responses, as witnessed in the divergent perceptions of a "single" tree. First, Wordsworth: "But there's a Tree, of many one, / A single Field which I have looked upon, / Both of them speak of something that is gone." Then Ashbery, two hundred years later: "Yet the tree treats me like a brute friend." With his brutal honesty, Ashbery obliges one to attend to the present moment instead of the Wordsworthian life at a remove. "Our life is but a sleep and a forgetting," Wordsworth sometimes imagines. And Ashbery? "It was as if all of it had never happened, / my shoelaces were untied, and—am I forgetting anything?" Bringing to a close both And the Stars Were Shining and "And the Stars Were Shining," these lines testify to Ashbery's extraordinarily surefooted appropriation of Wordsworth in the volume, for it is as if Wordsworth were speaking, yet the words come out Ashbery's.

Ashbery grew up on a farm outside Rochester—spending many weekends in town, where his grandfather was chairman of the University of Rochester physics department—and he has said that "the one thing I wanted to do was get the hell out of where I was and go to a city, preferably New York, and that's what I ended up doing." In a nostalgic frame of mind he muses not on "the growing Boy," as Wordsworth did or like the more conventionally Romantic Martory, but on his years as a "young adult." The poet's state of mind isn't exactly nostalgic, however, because it doesn't face in just one direction. The young adult he remembers is the young adult whom, as a child, he imagined he would become. This complex, Janus-faced temporality is probably the most distinctive feature of Ashbery's poetry, much more so than the often-commented-upon play with personal pronouns. At different points in his career the play of time (in the sense that one speaks of the play of light) has itself taken distinctive forms, as it does again in And the Stars Were Shining.

Ashbery's relation with Martory plays an exemplary role here. Martory has said that when they lived together he showed Ashbery his poems "without putting any pressure on him, and he didn't seem to pay any attention…. He did do that later, much later… [and] seems to have discovered suddenly that I am a poet." This new attention to Martory's poetry is one aspect of the renewed attention that, in the writing of the last decade, Ashbery has directed toward the period of his youth. This extended period may be characterized as a time of schooling, and further divided into three parts: first, the years that Ashbery's grandfather, as he has put it, "took over my education"; second, his formal training at Deerfield Academy, Harvard, and Columbia; third, the self-reeducation that occurred during the years in Paris.

It is in his schooling, in fact, that Ashbery's differences with Wordsworth can most clearly be observed. For whether one takes the Ode as one's touchstone, with Nature understood as "that immortal sea / Which brought us hither," or earlier poems in which Wordsworth describes "the growth of mental power" as a consequence of his schooling in a difficult and glorious Nature, he always insists that it is to Nature that one owes one's imaginative capabilities and hence capacity for heightened ("poetic") consciousness. Wordsworth's Nature—embodied if not fully realized in a countryside that exists beyond the reach of an unsympathetic and unsympathetically portrayed city—is precisely where Ashbery feels least at home. Concerning his own country home, a Victorian mansion he has been restoring for the past fifteen years to resemble his grandfather's house in Rochester, he has said: " I kind of like the fact that I have a house in upstate New York and I have the advantage of no longer being a child and also of being able to get to New York City whenever I want and very easily."

In this way Ashbery is able, even outside his poetry, to resolve the conflict he experienced so strongly as a child between country and city, a divide that Wordsworth wished, if anything, to widen. As I suggested earlier, the decisive collapse of this distinction, with country moving in on the city and city moving out into the countryside, serves as a defining characteristic of modern life and modern poetry. The sun now rises, as Ashbery observed two decades ago, in a suburbia that stretches beyond the horizon, "the morning holocaust become one vast furnace." Still, the true site of exile for Ashbery—and in this he stands opposed to all forms of primitivism, Romantic or Modernist—is the cityless country. What sets his work off from most poetry written today is that in it country and city are accompanied by temporal cousins that are inseparable not only from the two intersecting spatial grids but also from each other. When city and country meet, two distinct forms of temporality collide, linear and cyclical: time that's organized minute by minute—day to day, week to week, month to month—or by season ("Next thing you know it's winter"). Filofax vs. Farmer's Almanac. The unyielding movement of then and now and the turning back on itself of then is now.

Ashbery's poetry serves as an extreme yet nonetheless composed form of reverie, something along the lines of Keats's "Was it a vision, or a waking dream?… Do I wake or sleep?" One consequence is that the seasons and cycles of the pastoral city receive the attention due them. The soul "isn't engaged in trade," Ashbery attests in the superb "Not Planning a Trip Back": "it's woven of sleep and the weather / Of sleep." Yet neither is it absolutely disengaged. Day-to-day rhythms are conjoined with the very differently patterned day-to-night-to-day rhythms. As he proposes in "Just For Starters," effectively setting the stage for Keats: " I don't know what got me to write this poem / or any other (I mean why does one write?), / unless you spoke to me in my dream / and replied to your waking / and the affair of sleeping and waking began."

The "inhabited landscapes" of Martory's poetry are alternately foreign and local, rural and urban, actual place and painted (or filmed) representation. It's much more difficult to specify the exact nature of Ashbery's settings; still, one can assert that, like Baudelaire's "Landscape," a ravishing translation of which is included in Ashbery's 1984 collection, A Wave, every landscape in And the Stars Were Shining is cityscape. What distinguishes Ashbery's poetry from both Martory's and Baudelaire's is not the subject matter but the quantity and range of his unsettling juxtapositions, the "motion" with which the riddling "Like a Sentence" concludes, "etched there, shaking to be free."

A sort of informal formality has always characterized Ashbery's poetry—the way, for instance, his longer poems incorporate seemingly arbitrary formal schemes, whether the length of the line, the number of lines per stanza, or even, as in a work like the 313-line "Clepsydra," the sheer absence of stanzas or strophes. The form remains recognizably arbitrary, artificial, yet it becomes integral to the particular work. It's this informalism that Ashbery stretches almost to the breaking point in "And the Stars Were Shining." In formal terms nothing holds this baker's dozen of sections together, which range from twelve lines to a hundred and thirty, divided into strophes of varying lengths, with even a rhymed quatrain—a variant on the common measure of hymns—thrown in for good measure: "where not too much ever happens, / / except growing up, hook by hook, / year after tethered year. / And in the basement, that book, / just another thing to fear"

"I've never really done this before," Ashbery acknowledges at the beginning of section 8. "See, couldn't do it … See, can try again." "There is still another thing I have to do," section 11 opens: "I've never been able to do this" (Ashbery's italics). Just what this is—"this icon. That walks and jabbers / fortuitously or not"—becomes clearer in the next-to-last section, which concludes: "the hothouse beckons. / I've told you before how afraid this makes me, / but I think we can handle it together, / and this is as good a place as any / to unseal my last surprise: you, as you go, / diffident, indifferent, but with the sky for an awning / for as many days as it pleases it to cover you. / That's what I meant by 'get a handle,' and as I say it, / both surface and subtext subside quintessentially / and the deadletter office dissolves in the blue acquiescence of spring."

The "you" in these lines may refer to the reader or to some unidentified third party, but surely it's addressed "quint-essentially" to the words on the page, "my last surprise," dead letters dissolving in "blue acquiescence." This poem, and the entire volume, is composed under the sign of Death, "a life of afterwords," its presiding spirit the still scandalously underappreciated American poet Laura Riding, whose writing Ashbery has worked diligently to publicize. Riding, who died at the age of ninety in 1991, was the author of such important poems as "The Judgement," "The Life of the Dead," and "Death as Death." In the early 1940s she stopped writing poetry when she concluded that it was impossible to remove the poet, who never means exactly what the words seem to say, from the poetry. Two of Ashbery's poems in the present volume, "World's End" and "Footfalls," complement poems of Riding's with identical or nearly identical titles ("World's End," "Footfalling"). Behind the four-stanza pantoum "Seasonal" in Hotel Lautréamont, in which Ashbery contemplates "what a lying writer knows," can be discerned the harsh truths of Riding's withering prose poem, "Poet: A Lying Word."

Now, in "And the Stars Were Shining," Ashbery keeps pace with Winter. "It was the solstice," the poem opens, "and it was jumping on you like a friendly dog." The sun, and with it the passage of time, does not stand still, despite the fact that that is what "solstice" literally means. During the first eleven sections of the poem the season remains constant; this is a poem of winter, of undoing, but not, like the more insistently analytic poetry of the late fifties, with the objective of "taking poetry apart." In contrast to Eliot in The Waste Land (" I had not thought death had undone so many"), Ashbery stands firmly on the side of life and the life of poetry. "It was their / funeral, and they should have had a say in its undoing."

When, at the end of the poem's penultimate section, Spring is observed to "acquiesce"—presumably to anything one wants, hope springing eternal—and then in the last section, thirteenth month of a long winter, the interlocutor is told that "Summer won't end in your lap" (meaning both Summer won 't come to an end with you and you won 't be settling down with Summer), these are prospective seasons. The speaker stands outside their orbit even if his writing may not: "So—if you want to come with me …" He remains in his poetry and yet can envision, pace Riding, the poetry surviving his death. Here, "at the end," Ashbery composes himself in the face of his own death, and not, as in so many of his previous poems, in confronting the deaths of others. On this occasion time is neither cyclical (it remains winter, never quite making it to spring) nor linear (it remains winter, after all). It's time to end, unless the poet has forgotten something, in which case it's time to move on.