John Ashbery offers the reader a sort of Pilgrim's Progress [in Houseboat Days]: one may indulge with him in the frivolities of Vanity Fair, or one may follow his very rigorous trains of thought about the nature of modern poetry itself. (p. 118)

This reader prefers the Roman side of Ashbery to the Rococo, for when he tries his hand at political bread and circuses, there is about it something sinister and arrogant. He nabokovs us, with a wild goose chase after the likes of Daffy Duck or a glut of the sugary confections of "Valentine." The gyrations of "Pyrography" grate less, but it's still a pastiche of Americana—a papier-mâché carousel. Ashbery takes his busman's holiday—it would seem—as a necessary escape from the stern task he has set himself.

To the persistent reader John Ashbery reveals himself as a poet of high moral seriousness, an...