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Ashbery, John - Collected Poems 1956–1987
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John Ashbery

Collected Poems 1956–1987

Some Trees • The Tennis Court Oath • Rivers and Mountains • The Double Dream of Spring • Three Poems • The Vermont Notebook • Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror • Houseboat Days • As We Know • Shadow Train • A Wave • April Galleons • uncollected poems

 
"This major book, the first collection from The Library of America by a living poet, offers a view of Ashbery's artistic development over many decades.... He is, according to both his admirers and his critics, the towering figuring in contemporary American poetry."
— Publishers Weekly (starred review)
 
Overview  |  Table of Contents
 
  • SOME TREES
  • Two Scenes
  • Popular Songs
  • Eclogue
  • The Instruction Manual
  • The Grapevine
  • A Boy
  • Glazunoviana
  • The Hero
  • Poem
  • Album Leaf
  • The Picture of Little J. A. in a Prospect of Flowers
  • Pantoum
  • Grand Abacus
  • The Mythological Poet
  • Sonnet
  • Chaos
  • The Orioles
  • The Young Son
  • The Thinnest Shadow
  • Canzone
  • Errors
  • Illustration
  • Some Trees
  • Hotel Dauphin
  • The Painter
  • And You Know
  • He
  • Meditations of a Parrot
  • Sonnet
  • A Long Novel
  • The Way They Took
  • The Pied Piper
  • Answering a Question in the Mountains
  • A Pastoral
  • Le livre est sur la table
  • THE TENNIS COURT OATH
  • The Tennis Court Oath
  • “They Dream Only of America”
  • Thoughts of a Young Girl
  • America
  • Two Sonnets
  • To Redouté
  • Night
  • “How Much Longer Will I Be Able to Inhabit the Divine Sepulcher . . . ”
  • Rain
  • A White Paper
  • Leaving the Atocha Station
  • White Roses
  • The Suspended Life
  • A Life Drama
  • Our Youth
  • The Ticket
  • An Additional Poem
  • Measles
  • Faust
  • The Lozenges
  • The Ascetic Sensualists
  • Landscape
  • A Last World
  • The New Realism
  • The Unknown Travelers
  • Europe
  • To the Same Degree
  • The Passive Preacher
  • The Shower
  • Idaho
  • RIVERS AND MOUNTAINS
  • These Lacustrine Cities
  • Rivers and Mountains
  • Last Month
  • Civilization and Its Discontents
  • If the Birds Knew
  • Into the Dusk-Charged Air
  • The Ecclesiast
  • The Recent Past
  • The Thousand Islands
  • A Blessing in Disguise
  • Clepsydra
  • The Skaters
  • THE DOUBLE DREAM OF SPRING
  • The Task
  • Spring Day
  • Plainness in Diversity
  • Soonest Mended
  • Summer
  • It Was Raining in the Capital
  • Variations, Calypso and Fugue on a Theme of Ella Wheeler Wilcox
  • Song
  • Decoy
  • Evening in the Country
  • For John Clare
  • French Poems
  • The Double Dream of Spring
  • Rural Objects
  • Years of Indiscretion
  • Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape
  • Sunrise in Suburbia
  • Definition of Blue
  • Parergon
  • The Hod Carrier
  • An Outing
  • Some Words
  • Young Man with Letter
  • Clouds
  • The Bungalows
  • The Chateau Hardware
  • Sortes Vergilianae
  • Fragment
  • THREE POEMS
  • The New Spirit
  • The System
  • The Recital
  • THE VERMONT NOTEBOOK
  • SELF-PORTRAIT IN A CONVEX MIRROR
  • As One Put Drunk into the Packet-Boat
  • Worsening Situation
  • Forties Flick
  • As You Came from the Holy Land
  • A Man of Words
  • Scheherazade
  • Absolute Clearance
  • Grand Galop
  • Poem in Three Parts
  • Voyage in the Blue
  • Farm
  • Farm II
  • Farm III
  • Hop o’ My Thumb
  • De Imagine Mundi
  • Foreboding
  • The Tomb of Stuart Merrill
  • Tarpaulin
  • River
  • Mixed Feelings
  • The One Thing That Can Save America
  • Tenth Symphony
  • On Autumn Lake
  • Fear of Death
  • Ode to Bill
  • Lithuanian Dance Band
  • Sand Pail
  • No Way of Knowing
  • Suite
  • Märchenbilder
  • City Afternoon
  • Robin Hood’s Barn
  • All and Some
  • Oleum Misericordiae
  • Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror
  • HOUSEBOAT DAYS
  • Street Musicians
  • The Other Tradition
  • Variant
  • Collective Dawns
  • Wooden Buildings
  • Pyrography
  • The Gazing Grain
  • Unctuous Platitudes
  • The Couple in the Next Room
  • The Explanation
  • Loving Mad Tom
  • Business Personals
  • Crazy Weather
  • On the Towpath
  • Melodic Trains
  • Bird’s-Eye View of the Tool and Die Co.
  • Wet Casements
  • Saying It to Keep It from Happening
  • Daffy Duck in Hollywood
  • All Kinds of Caresses
  • Lost and Found and Lost Again
  • Two Deaths
  • Houseboat Days
  • Whether It Exists
  • The Lament upon the Waters
  • Drame Bourgeois
  • And Ut Pictura Poesis Is Her Name
  • What Is Poetry
  • And Others, Vaguer Presences
  • The Wrong Kind of Insurance
  • The Serious Doll
  • Friends
  • The Thief of Poetry
  • The Ice-Cream Wars
  • Valentine
  • Blue Sonata
  • Spring Light
  • Syringa
  • Fantasia on “The Nut-Brown Maid”
  • AS WE KNOW
  • Litany
  • Sleeping in the Corners of Our Lives
  • Silhouette
  • Many Wagons Ago
  • As We Know
  • Figures in a Landscape
  • Statuary
  • Otherwise
  • Five Pedantic Pieces
  • Flowering Death
  • Haunted Landscape
  • My Erotic Double
  • I Might Have Seen It
  • The Hills and Shadows of a New Adventure
  • Knocking Around
  • Not Only / But Also
  • Train Rising Out of the Sea
  • Late Echo
  • And I’d Love You To Be in It
  • Tapestry
  • The Preludes
  • A Box and Its Contents
  • The Cathedral Is
  • I Had Thought Things Were Going Along Well
  • Out Over the Bay the Rattle of Firecrackers
  • We Were on the Terrace Drinking Gin and Tonics
  • Fallen Tree
  • The Picnic Grounds
  • A Sparkler
  • The Wine
  • A Love Poem
  • There’s No Difference
  • Distant Relatives
  • Histoire Universelle
  • Hittite Lullaby
  • In a Boat
  • Variations on an Original Theme
  • Homesickness
  • This Configuration
  • Metamorphosis
  • Their Day
  • A Tone Poem
  • The Other Cindy
  • No, But I Seen One You Know You Don’t Own
  • The Shower
  • Landscapeople
  • The Sun
  • The Plural of “Jack-in-the-Box”
  • SHADOW TRAIN
  • The Pursuit of Happiness
  • Punishing the Myth
  • Paradoxes and Oxymorons
  • Another Chain Letter
  • The Ivory Tower
  • Every Evening When the Sun Goes Down
  • The Freedom of the House
  • A Pact with Sullen Death
  • White-Collar Crime
  • At the Inn
  • The Absence of a Noble Presence
  • The Prophet Bird
  • Qualm
  • Breezy Stories
  • Oh, Nothing
  • Of the Islands
  • Farm Film
  • Here Everything Is Still Floating
  • Joe Leviathan
  • Some Old Tires
  • A Prison All the Same
  • Drunken Americans
  • Something Similar
  • Penny Parker’s Mistake
  • Or in My Throat
  • Untilted
  • At Lotus Lodge
  • Corky’s Car Keys
  • Night Life
  • Written in the Dark
  • Caesura
  • The Leasing of September
  • On the Terrace of Ingots
  • Tide Music
  • Unusual Precautions
  • Flow Blue
  • Hard Times
  • “Moi, je suis la tulipe . . .”
  • Catalpas
  • We Hesitate
  • The Desperado
  • The Image of the Shark Confronts the Image of the Little Match Girl
  • Songs Without Words
  • Indelible, Inedible
  • School of Velocity
  • Frontispiece
  • Everyman’s Library
  • Shadow Train
  • But Not That One
  • The Vegetarians
  • A WAVE
  • At North Farm
  • Rain Moving In
  • The Songs We Know Best
  • When the Sun Went Down
  • Landscape (After Baudelaire)
  • Just Walking Around
  • A Fly
  • The Ongoing Story
  • Thank You For Not Cooperating
  • But What Is the Reader To Make of This?
  • Down by the Station, Early in the Morning
  • Around the Rough and Rugged Rocks the Ragged Rascal Rudely Ran
  • More Pleasant Adventures
  • Purists Will Object
  • Description of a Masque
  • The Path to the White Moon
  • Ditto, Kiddo
  • Introduction
  • I See, Said the Blind Man, as He Put Down His Hammer and Saw
  • Edition Peters, Leipzig
  • 37 Haiku
  • Haibun
  • Haibun 2
  • Haibun 3
  • Haibun 4
  • Haibun 5
  • Haibun 6
  • Variation on a Noel
  • Staffage
  • The Lonedale Operator
  • Proust’s Questionnaire
  • Cups with Broken Handles
  • Just Someone You Say Hi To
  • They Like
  • So Many Lives
  • Never Seek to Tell Thy Love
  • Darlene’s Hospital
  • Destiny Waltz
  • Try Me! I’m Different!
  • One of the Most Extraordinary Things in Life
  • Whatever It Is, Wherever You Are
  • Trefoil
  • Problems
  • A Wave
  • APRIL GALLEONS
  • Vetiver
  • Riddle Me
  • Morning Jitters
  • A Snowball in Hell
  • Dreams of Adulthood
  • A Mood of Quiet Beauty
  • When half the time they don’t know themselves . . .
  • Adam Snow
  • Forgotten Song
  • Finnish Rhapsody
  • Forgotten Sex
  • Insane Decisions
  • No I Don’t
  • Posture of Unease
  • Alone in the Lumber Business
  • Vaucanson
  • Unreleased Movie
  • Disguised Zenith
  • Railroad Bridge
  • October at the Window
  • No Two Alike
  • Amid Mounting Evidence
  • Letters I Did or Did Not Get
  • Frost
  • Life as a Book That Has Been Put Down
  • Too Happy, Happy Tree
  • Song of the Windshield Wipers
  • The Mouse
  • Song: “Mostly Places . . .”
  • Sighs and Inhibitions
  • Someone You Have Seen Before
  • Ostensibly
  • Becalmed on Strange Waters
  • The Big Cloud
  • Not a First
  • Polite Distortions
  • Fourth Prize
  • Some Money
  • Winter Weather Advisory
  • Never To Get It Really Right
  • Gorboduc
  • The Romantic Entanglement
  • Wet Are the Boards
  • And Some Were Playing Cards, and Some Were Playing Dice
  • Fall Pageant
  • One Coat of Paint
  • Offshore Breeze
  • Savage Menace
  • The Leopard and the Lemur
  • By the Flooded Canal
  • Bilking the Statues
  • The Ice Storm
  • April Galleons
  • UNCOLLECTED POEMS
  • Seasonal
  • Lost Cove
  • A Sermon: Amos 8:11–14
  • Elegy
  • A Fable
  • Song from a Play
  • Why We Forget Dreams
  • For a European Child
  • Friar Laurence’s Cell
  • From a Diary
  • The Dolors of Columbine
  • A Dream
  • Turandot
  • White
  • The Minstrel Boy
  • Chinatown
  • Abstentions
  • April Fool’s Day
  • The Poems
  • The Night Cry
  • Evening Quatrains
  • Fortune
  • To a Waterfowl
  • A Vase of Flowers
  • The Young Prince and the Young Princess
  • Maintenance
  • The Adirondacks
  • Late December
  • Copy of a Copy
  • Undated
  • Balance of Payments
  • Blackthorn
  • Upper Silesia
  • Faster than Birds Can Fly
  • One Hundred Multiple-Choice Questions
  • “I open my eyes to the strange unhappiness of autumn”
  • Scenery
  • The Enchanted Lake
  • Nouvelles Pièces Froides
  • All the Sonatas
  • Sponge
  • Aurora de ti Misma
  • Dangling Modifiers
  • Fretwork
  • Happy Autumn Fields
  • Stance
  • Once Upon a Time
  • “Kannst du die alten Lieder noch Spielen?”
  • Morning in Helsinki
  • Winter Scene
  • Background Music
  • The Foggiest
  • Shining the Blue
  • The Strayed Reveller
  • Endless Variation
  • Nothing to Steal
  • The Bushiness of Infinity
  • Dream Overture
  • Imperfect Sympathies
  • The Good Old Days
  • Art Songs
  • Drab Shutters
  • “Meanwhile / far above / the street”
  • Deep in My Heart, Dear
  • Minor Traveler

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