"No one now writing poetry in the English language is likelier than Ashbery to survive the severe judgments of time. . . . He is joining that American sequence that includes Whitman, Dickinson, Stevens, and Hart Crane."
–Harold Bloom "
Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror is certainly one of the most sustained performances in American writing. . . . John Ashbery, more than any other contemporary, is the poet of the momentary, the transitory. This preoccupation animates everything he writes, and what he writes is some of the best poetry of our day."
–The Washington Post "Ashbery is astonishingly original, and though his mannerisms have been widely imitated, he himself has imitated no one."
–Edmund White "A style devoid of pretension and a beautiful ease of manner that is rarely less than enchanting . . . There is no one who writes quite like Ashbery, and the poetic territory he inhabits is very much his own."
–Paul Auster
