The manner [of "Fantasia on 'The Nut-Brown Maid'" in Houseboat Days] defies the matter. It is itself a "new season," a joyful performance of dazed thought. If the subject matter is "nothing," or the loss of what Wallace Stevens called "the first idea," the imagination's print on things, the language leaves its own unique print. The language itself is the "content," the difficulty we find in getting hold of the matter is the poetry. Here, as before, Ashbery goes for the music possible in confused logic and syntax. (His facility at this divine game is now marvelous.) His originality, in part, is to slip disorder into the very idiom of intellectual competence, with its distinctions and comparisons, its forensic pointings and persuasions. Urbane, outwardly reasonable, his procedures imply (with very little effort) an objective order of communication that the slippages among the clauses, the peculiarity of the comparisons...