ASHBERY, John

Because Ashbery has by the 1990s become the epitome of the Major American Poet, it is easy to forget that he began as a fairly experimental writer. His long poem Europe (1960) is a classic of acoherent diffuseness, which is to say that the poet drew words from a variety of sources, barely connecting them. (Acoherence in literature is comparable to atonality in music.) When this poem appeared in Ashbery's second book, The Tennis Court Oath (1962), the critic John...