It is John Ashbery, more than anyone else, who has been responsible for creating that measure of recognition conceded nowadays to abstract poetry. Abstraction is a questionable term for a form which insists on the reality of its medium; making us aware of the surface we are looking at, or of the actuality of the words in a text, whatever the content signified by it. In Ashbery's case, a laconic acceptance of the ordinary may resemble content; but his detached, amusing, sometimes melancholy tone provides the excuse for a poetry which tunes us in to a consideration of syntax and sentence-construction - the feeling of how things hang together, or could or should or might hang together - just as an intriguing piece of music leads us from its beginning to its end. The gist of a previous passage may slip away as we read further, but again and again we stumble as if by accident on phrases of deep import: they come upon us like sudden raindrops out of a blue sky.

I have heard him referred to as a poet difficult to understand. However, I have found it easy to appreciate the poems I have got to know. It is hardly a question of comprehension, but simply that the flow of his inspiration is charted by his language - to shape a phrase out of the title of his long poem 'Flow-chart'. Like a landscape, his poetry is to be returned to and dwelt in. ...