Although the stature of John Ashbery as a leading American poet had already been established by collections such as
The Tennis Court Oath(1962) and
The Double Dream of Spring(1970), the poems in
Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror(1975) helped change the critical perception about Ashbery’s contribution to American poetry. Previously valued for his similarities to Auden, Stevens or Pasternak, and the influence of the French surrealists, it is starting with this volume that both critics and readers have gradually come to see him not as an obscure, avant-garde experimentalist but as a major American poet embedded within the Romantic-Modernist tradition. Just a year after its publication,
Self-Portraitalready situated Ashbery as a poetic voice along the lines of Emerson, Whitman, Eliot and…
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Citation: Jiménez Muñoz, Antonio José. "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 31 January 2013 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=12392, accessed 12 October 2024.]