Some Trees

A capsule of the imaginative life of the individual, Some Trees is the 52nd volume of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Comparing him to T. S. Eliot, Stephanie Burt writes that Ashbery is the last figure whom half of the English-language poets alive thought a great model, and the other half thought incomprehensible. After the publication of Some Trees, selecting judge W. H. Auden famously confessed that he didnt understand a word of it. Most reviews were negative. But in this first book of poems from one of the centurys most important poets, one finds the seeds of Ashberys oeuvre, including the influence of French surrealistsmany of whom he translatedand abstract expressionism.