Bloom's Major Poets - John Ashbery - Comprehensive Research and Study Guide (181p) [Inua].pdf

Title: John Ashbery: Comprehensive Research and Study Guide
Author: Harold Bloom
Series: Bloom's Major Poets
Library Binding: 112 pages
Publisher: Chelsea House Pub (L) (March 2004)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0791078876
ISBN-13: 978-0791078877

Description:
- User's guide
- Editor's note and introduction by Harold Bloom
- A comprehensive biography of the poet
- Detailed thematic analysis of each poem
- Extracts from major critical essays that discuss important aspects of each poem
- A complete bibliography of the writer's poetic works
- A list of critical works about the poet and his or her works
- An index of themes and ideas in the author's work

John Lawrence Ashbery (born July 28, 1927) is an American poet. He has published more than twenty volumes of poetry and won nearly every major American award for poetry, including a Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for his collection Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. Renowned for its postmodern complexity and opacity, Ashbery's work still proves controversial. Ashbery has stated that he wishes his work to be accessible to as many people as possible, and not to be a private dialogue with himself. At the same time, he once joked that some critics still view him as "a harebrained, homegrown surrealist whose poetry defies even the rules and logic of Surrealism."

"No figure looms so large in American poetry over the past 50 years as John Ashbery," Langdon Hammer, chairman of the English Department at Yale University, wrote in 2008. "No American poet has had a larger, more diverse vocabulary, not Whitman, not Pound." Stephen Burt, a poet and Harvard professor of English, has compared Ashbery to T. S. Eliot, calling Ashbery "the last figure whom half the English-language poets alive thought a great model, and the other half thought incomprehensible".