One of Ashbery's most important masterworks: Widely studied, critically admired, and essential to understanding one of the modern era's most revolutionary poets The Double Dream of Spring, originally published in 1970, followed the critical success of John Ashbery's National Book Award–nominated collection Rivers and Mountains and introduced the signature voice-reflective, acute, and attuned to modern language as it is spoken-that just a few years later would carry Ashbery's Pulitzer Prize–winning masterpiece Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. Ashbery fans and lovers of modern poetry alike will recognize here some of the century's most anthologized and critically admired works of poetry, including "Soonest Mended," "Decoy," "Sunrise in Suburbia," "Evening in the Country," the achingly beautiful long poem "Fragment," and Ashbery's so-called Popeye poem, the mordant and witty "Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape." The Double Dream of Spring helped cement Ashbery's reputation as a must-read American poet, and no library of modern poetry is complete without it.
"Here Ashbery reaches his own recognizable greatness, and gives us his variety of the American Sublime. . . . A skeptical honesty, self-reflexive, and an odd faith in a near-inscrutable order remain characteristic of Ashbery's work."
Harold Bloom, Salmagundi
"The great innovation of Ashbery's poems is that they do not explain or symbolize or even refer to some experience the poet has had, something outside themselves in the world, something precedent. . . . They are their own creation, and it would be fair to say that the world is, instead, a comment on them."
Richard Howard, Poetry
"This is Ashbery at his best, with all his characteristic difficulty, but also with his humor and his lyric gift. . . . Most of the poems in this book perform discoveries, satisfied with nothing accidental, nothing less refined than 'Fables that time invents / To explain its passing.'"
