The Poetics of Vision and the Redemption of the Subject in John Ashbery’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror

In the “Final Note” to his 1977 study of Five Temperaments: Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, James Merril, Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery, David Kalstone wrote that on “reading Ashbery’s work, I often have the feeling that he speaks not only to his moment but to the condition of much postmodernist poetry.” A condition that is to do, in Kalstone’s terms, with the ways in which postmodernist poetry explores the relation between language — the medium of poetry — and the self: Ashbery, Kalstone goes..