John Ashbery, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror

Antonio José Jiménez Muñoz

Ed. by Erik Martiny, Paris Science et Lettres
The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.2.4: American (US) Writing and Culture: Postwar and Contemporary, 1945-present.
Vol. editors: Emory Elliott (University of California, Riverside), Dale Enggass (University of Utah), Christopher Hugh Gair (University of Glasgow), Matthew Hofer (University of New Mexico), Stephen E. Meats (Pittsburg State University), Kerry Myler (Newman University), Justin Parks (UiT - The Arctic University of Norway), Nick Selby (University of East Anglia)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1975

Places

United States (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Poem collection

Resources

Although the stature of John Ashbery as a leading American poet had already been established by collections such as The Tennis Court Oath (1962) and The Double Dream of Spring (1970), the poems in Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975) helped change the critical perception about Ashbery’s contribution to American poetry. Previously valued for his similarities to Auden, Stevens or Pasternak, and the influence of the French surrealists, it is starting with this volume that both critics and readers have gradually come to see him not as an obscure, avant-garde experimentalist but as a major American poet embedded within the Romantic-Modernist tradition. Just a year after its publication, Self-Portrait already s…

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Citation: Jiménez Muñoz, Antonio José. "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 31 January 2013 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=12392, accessed 19 April 2024.]

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