After the "monstrous, magnificent sprawl" of John Ashbery's 216-page poem "Flow Chart" (1991) and the further munificence of "Hotel Lautreamont" (1992), his sixteenth collection, "And the Stars were Shining", includes a thirteen-part title poem which...

The great poet-critic of his age, Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) is now best remembered as a poet for "Dover Beath", "The Scholar Gypsy" and "Thyrsis". Beside these well-loved and widely anthologised poems, this book places a selection of other poems in...

The Count of Lautreamont – a nineteenth-century poet about whom little is known, except that he spent his brief adult life in various hotels in Paris, checking out of his transient existence at the age of 24 – is one of the forgotten presences alive...

Webster's Dictionary defines a "flow-chart" as a "schematic diagram... showing the progress of materials through the various stages of a manufacturing process". In this "Flow Chart", a book-length poem, John Ashbery charts the ebb and flow of life p...

Over forty new poems in verse and prose make up "A Wave", John Ashbery's tenth collection. The title poem is a twenty-page meditation on change, loss and adjustment; it is a major poem that takes place alongside "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" and...