'An individual and authoritative reading of one of the great poets of our time. In discussing Ashbery, Hickman also brilliantly evokes the English poets who influenced him, from Donne through Clare and the moderns. Hickman writes with clarity and depth of knowledge. He is rooted in the American yet also, and deeply, in the British and Continental traditions which most matter to an understanding of Ashbery's and most post-Modern American and British poetry. He relocates Ashbery's poems within the zones where they actually belong and where they tell us they belong.' Michael Schmidt, Professor of Poetry, University of Glasgow A study of how we should read one of America's most important poets Ben Hickman argues that we must attend to Ashbery's radical conception of reading if we are to understand the originality of his writing. His study focuses on Ashbery's reading of English poets, including Andrew Marvell, John Donne, William Wordsworth, John Clare, T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden, and examines Ashbery's writing in terms of an 'aesthetic of inattention'. Hickman critiques the Americanisation of Ashbery's work as well as common assumptions about his Romanticism, his avant-garde Modernism and his engagement with the historical present. He demonstrates that Ashbery's generosity as a writer is closely tied to his generosity, inattention and situatedness as a reader. Ben Hickman studied at University College, London and the University of Kent, and has published on the New York School, the New American Poetry, contemporary British poetry and John Clare. He currently teaches at the University of Kent.

Abbreviations; Acknowledgements; Introduction; 1. Lost words: Donne, Marvell and Ashberyan metaphor; 2. 'The music of all present': Ashberyan description and the presence of John Clare; 3. 'Always articulating these preludes': landscape, Wordsworth, 'A Wave' and after; 4. 'These decibels': Eliot, Ashbery, and allusion; 5. The first and most important influence: Ashbery and Auden; Bibliography; Index.