SOURCE: "To Create the Self," in Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. XXIII, No. 3, October, 1977, pp. 299-313.

In the following excerpt, Schulman explores the defining characteristics of Ashbery's visionary poetry

"From this I shall evolve a man,"¹ Wallace Stevens wrote of the mind's efforts to integrate the self by controlling a swarm of external phenomena. And in our time there are poets whose work is built on the awareness of disorder, confusion, and change, and for whom those very conditions generate the discovery of an interior life through powers above the level of reason. That self-discovery is attained by revelation that is not ultimate, as is the mystic's or the saint's; it is, however, genuine, in that the poet has broken through the limitations of conventional vision to see and to proclaim the truth of what has been seen.

The poetry of Arthur Gregor, John Ashbery, and Jean Garrigue is...