King of the kaleidoscope

摘要

There was a time when John Ashbery's obtuse writing style was seen as too strange to be poetry at all. All that interweaving of scraps of conversation with literary references, mixing the high-flown and the orotund with the casually demotic, used to give his readers vertigo. Now, though, Mr Ashbery, who will be 78 in July, has become something of a national monument, albeit one which visitors walk around and occasionally, if still a little warily, even glance up at.