Contains the collected works of American author and poet, John Ashbery, along with sixty uncollected poems, from 1956-1987.\With this volume The Library of America inaugurates a collected edition of the works of America’s preeminent living poet. Long associated with the New York School that came to the fore in the 1950s, John Ashbery has charted a profoundly original course that has opened up pathways for subsequent generations of poets. At once hermetic and exuberantly curious, meditative and unnervingly funny, dreamlike and steeped in everyday realities, alive to every nuance of American speech, these are poems that constantly discover new worlds within language and its unexpected permutations.

"Mark Ford is the editor of this volume"--P. [vii]. Includes index.

SOME TREES--Two Scenes--Popular Songs--Eclogue--The Instruction Manual--The Grapevine--A Boy--Glazunoviana--The Hero--Poem--Album Leaf--The Picture of Little J. A. in a Prospect of Flowers-Pantoum--Grand Abacus--The Mythological Poet-Sonnet--Chaos--The Orioles--The Young Son--The Thinnest Shadow--Canzone--Errors--Illustration--Some Trees--Hotel Dauphin--The Painter--And You Know--He--Meditations of a Parrot--Sonnet--A Long Novel--The Way They Took--The Pied Piper--Answering a Question in the Mountains--A Pastoral--Le livre est sur la table--THE TENNIS COURT OATH--The Tennis Court Oath--"They Dream Only of America"--Thoughts of a Young Girl--America--Two Sonnets--To Redouté--Night--"How Much Longer Will I Be Able to Inhabit the Divine Sepulcher . . . "--Rain--A White Paper--Leaving the Atocha Station--White Roses--The Suspended Life--A Life Drama--Our Youth--The Ticket--An Additional Poem--Measles--Faust--The Lozenges--The Ascetic Sensualists--Landscape--A Last World--The New Realism--The Unknown Travelers--Europe--To the Same Degree--The Passive Preacher--The Shower--Idaho--RIVERS AND MOUNTAINS--These Lacustrine Cities--Rivers and Mountains--Last Month--Civilization and Its Discontents--If the Birds Knew--Into the Dusk-Charged Air--The Ecclesiast--The Recent Past--The Thousand Islands--A Blessing in Disguise--Clepsydra--The Skaters--THE DOUBLE DREAM OF SPRING--The Task--Spring Day--Plainness in Diversity--Soonest Mended--Summer--It Was Raining in the Capital--Variations, Calypso and Fugue on a Theme of Ella Wheeler Wilcox--Song--Decoy--Evening in the Country--For John Clare--French Poems--The Double Dream of Spring--Rural Objects--Years of Indiscretion--Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape--Sunrise in Suburbia--Definition of Blue--Parergon--The Hod Carrier--An Outing--Some Words--Young Man with Letter--Clouds--The Bungalows--The Chateau Hardware--Sortes Vergilianae--Fragment--THREE POEMS--The New Spirit--The System--The Recital--THE VERMONT NOTEBOOK--SELF-PORTRAIT IN A CONVEX MIRROR--As One Put Drunk into the Packet-Boat--Worsening Situation--Forties Flick--As You Came from the Holy Land--A Man of Words--Scheherazade--Absolute Clearance--Grand Galop--Poem in Three Parts--Voyage in the Blue--Farm--Farm II--Farm III--Hop o' My Thumb--De Imagine Mundi--Foreboding--The Tomb of Stuart Merrill--Tarpaulin--River--Mixed Feelings--The One Thing That Can Save America--Tenth Symphony--On Autumn Lake--Fear of Death--Ode to Bill--Lithuanian Dance Band--Sand Pail--No Way of Knowing-Suite--Märchenbilder--City Afternoon--Robin Hood's Barn--All and Some--Oleum Misericordiae--Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror--HOUSEBOAT DAYS--Street Musicians--The Other Tradition--Variant--Collective Dawns--Wooden Buildings--Pyrography--The Gazing Grain--Unctuous Platitudes--The Couple in the Next Room--The Explanation--Loving Mad Tom--Business Personals--Crazy Weather--On the Towpath--Melodic Trains--Bird's-Eye View of the Tool and Die Co.--Wet Casements--Saying It to Keep It from Happening--Daffy Duck in Hollywood--All Kinds of Caresses--Lost and Found and Lost Again--Two Deaths--Houseboat Days--Whether It Exists--The Lament upon the Waters--Drame Bourgeois--And Ut Pictura Poesis Is Her Name--What Is Poetry--And Others, Vaguer Presences--The Wrong Kind of Insurance--The Serious Doll--Friends--The Thief of Poetry--The Ice-Cream Wars--Valentine--Blue Sonata--Spring Light--Syringa--Fantasia on "The Nut-Brown Maid"--AS WE KNOW--Litany--Sleeping in the Corners of Our Lives--Silhouette--Many Wagons Ago--As We Know--Figures in a Landscape--Statuary--Otherwise--Five Pedantic Pieces--Flowering Death--Haunted Landscape--My Erotic Double--I Might Have Seen It--The Hills and Shadows of a New Adventure--Knocking Around--Not Only / But Also--Train Rising Out of the Sea--Late Echo--And I'd Love You To Be in It--Tapestry--The Preludes--A Box and Its Contents--The Cathedral Is--I Had Thought Things Were Going Along Well--Out Over the Bay the Rattle of Firecrackers--We Were on the Terrace Drinking Gin and Tonics--Fallen Tree--The Picnic Grounds--A Sparkler--The Wine--A Love Poem--There's No Difference--Distant Relatives--Histoire Universelle--Hittite Lullaby--In a Boat--Variations on an Original Theme--Homesickness--This Configuration--Metamorphosis--Their Day--A Tone Poem--The Other Cindy--No, But I Seen One You Know You Don't Own--The Shower--Landscapeople--The Sun--The Plural of "Jack-in-the-Box"--SHADOW TRAIN--The Pursuit of Happiness--Punishing the Myth--Paradoxes and Oxymorons--Another Chain Letter--The Ivory Tower--Every Evening When the Sun Goes Down--The Freedom of the House--A Pact with Sullen Death--White-Collar Crime--At the Inn--The Absence of a Noble Presence--The Prophet Bird--Qualm--Breezy Stories--Oh, Nothing--Of the Islands--Farm Film--Here Everything Is Still Floating--Joe Leviathan--Some Old Tires--A Prison All the Same--Drunken Americans--Something Similar--Penny Parker's Mistake--Or in My Throat--Untilted--At Lotus Lodge--Corky's Car Keys--Night Life--Written in the Dark--Caesura--The Leasing of September--On the Terrace of Ingots--Tide Music--Unusual Precautions--Flow Blue--Hard Times--"Moi, je suis la tulipe . . ."--Catalpas--We Hesitate--The Desperado--The Image of the Shark Confronts the Image of the Little Match Girl--Songs Without Words--Indelible, Inedible--School of Velocity--Frontispiece--Everyman's Library--Shadow Train--But Not That One--The Vegetarians--A WAVE--At North Farm--Rain Moving In--The Songs We Know Best--When the Sun Went Down--Landscape (After Baudelaire)--Just Walking Around--A Fly--The Ongoing Story--Thank You For Not Cooperating--But What Is the Reader To Make of This?--Down by the Station, Early in the Morning--Around the Rough and Rugged Rocks the Ragged Rascal Rudely Ran--More Pleasant Adventures--Purists Will Object--Description of a Masque--The Path to the White Moon--Ditto, Kiddo--Introduction--I See, Said the Blind Man, as He Put Down His Hammer and Saw--Edition Peters, Leipzig--37 Haiku--Haibun--Haibun 2--Haibun 3--Haibun 4--Haibun 5--Haibun 6--Variation on a Noel--Staffage--The Lonedale Operator--Proust's Questionnaire--Cups with Broken Handles--Just Someone You Say Hi To--They Like--So Many Lives--Never Seek to Tell Thy Love--Darlene's Hospital--Destiny Waltz--Try Me! I'm Different!--One of the Most Extraordinary Things in Life--Whatever It Is, Wherever You Are--Trefoil--Problems--A Wave--APRIL GALLEONS--Vetiver--Riddle Me--Morning Jitters--A Snowball in Hell--Dreams of Adulthood--A Mood of Quiet Beauty--When half the time they don't know themselves . . .--Adam Snow--Forgotten Song--Finnish Rhapsody--Forgotten Sex--Insane Decisions--No I Don't--Posture of Unease--Alone in the Lumber Business--Vaucanson--Unreleased Movie--Disguised Zenith--Railroad Bridge--October at the Window--No Two Alike--Amid Mounting Evidence--Letters I Did or Did Not Get--Frost--Life as a Book That Has Been Put Down--Too Happy, Happy Tree--Song of the Windshield Wipers--The Mouse--Song: "Mostly Places . . ."--Sighs and Inhibitions--Someone You Have Seen Before--Ostensibly--Becalmed on Strange Waters--The Big Cloud--Not a First--Polite Distortions--Fourth Prize--Some Money--Winter Weather Advisory--Never To Get It Really Right--Gorboduc--The Romantic Entanglement--Wet Are the Boards--And Some Were Playing Cards, and Some Were Playing Dice--Fall Pageant--One Coat of Paint--Offshore Breeze--Savage Menace--The Leopard and the Lemur--By the Flooded Canal--Bilking the Statues--The Ice Storm--April Galleons--UNCOLLECTED POEMS--Seasonal--Lost Cove--A Sermon: Amos 8:11-14--Elegy--A Fable--Song from a Play--Why We Forget Dreams--For a European Child--Friar Laurence's Cell--From a Diary--The Dolors of Columbine--A Dream--Turandot--White--The Minstrel Boy--Chinatown--Abstentions--April Fool's Day--The Poems--The Night Cry--Evening Quatrains--Fortune--To a Waterfowl--A Vase of Flowers--The Young Prince and the Young Princess--Maintenance--The Adirondacks--Late December--Copy of a Copy--Undated--Balance of Payments--Blackthorn--Upper Silesia--Faster than Birds Can Fly--One Hundred Multiple-Choice Questions--"I open my eyes to the strange unhappiness of autumn"--Scenery--The Enchanted Lake--Nouvelles Pièces Froides--All the Sonatas--Sponge--Aurora de ti Misma--Dangling Modifiers--Fretwork--Happy Autumn Fields--Stance--Once Upon a Time--"Kannst du die alten Lieder noch Spielen?"--Morning in Helsinki--Winter Scene--Background Music--The Foggiest--Shining the Blue--The Strayed Reveller--Endless Variation--Nothing to Steal--The Bushiness of Infinity--Dream Overture--Imperfect Sympathies--The Good Old Days--Art Songs--Drab Shutters--"Meanwhile / far above / the street"--Deep in My Heart, Dear--Minor Travelerwith Joe Brainard -- Some trees -- The tennis court oath -- Rivers and mountains -- The double dream of Spring -- Three poems -- The Vermont notebook / Self-portrait in a convex mirror -- Houseboat days -- As we know -- Shadow train -- A wave -- April galleons -- Uncollected poems.