During a career in which he has been reviled by traditionalists, championed by W. H. Auden, hailed as the eminence grise of postmodernism, named as successor to Wallace Stevens and carried off every major literary prize, John Ashbery has been many poets to many people. His startling work alternately (and sometimes simultaneously) playful and recondite, affirms poetry's power to astonish, to tackle fundamentals and to engage the reader on the deepest level. Drawn from the work he published up to 1984, from the spare, beautiful lyrics of Some Trees and the disjunctive experimentalism of The Tennis Court Oath, to the power meditations on subjectivity of Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, Houseboat Days and A Wave, this edition of John Ashbery's Selected Poems makes a wide range of this poet's writing available.