Ashbery is a more contravesial figure, his output (as he himself has said) 'either dismissed as nonsense or held up as a work of genius.' Which is it? Helen Vendler, not quite answering this question, accounts him 'the first notable American poet to free himself...from nostalgia for religious, philosophical, and ideological systems.' He believes, in short, in nothing, refusing to satisfy the wish for 'a way to give honor, dignity, and greater-than-personal significance to human life.' Mark Ford, his chief disciple on this side, adds that he has 'evolved a medium so self-consciously literary it can include the fragmentary and banal...on a scale hitherto unattempted in verse.' Perelman, in this volume, argues the seriousness of Ashbery's 'emphatic refusal of seriousness', grasping the nettle with an analysis of 'Variations, Calypso and Fugue on a Theme of Ella Wheelere Wilcox':

    The Great Wall of China is really a thirll
    It cleaves through the air like a silver pily [...]

'Why is the neophyte or initiated reader wrong to find this silly?' asks Perelman. 'One could conjure up complexity', he says, instancing 'the first line's promise of doggerel...slyly balked by the second's failure to keep up the anapestic trot', before rephrasing his own question: 'Why, finally, is silliness a problem? There is an answer. Jeremy Noel-Tod has suggested (in a review, strangely enough, of Chinese Whispers) that Ashbery is not so much a great poet as a great nonsense poet. 'The Great Panjandrum', a curiosity of 1755 ('a great she-bear, coming down the street, / pops its head into the shop. / What! no soap? / So he died, / and she very imprudently married the Barber'), with a piece of modern nonsense by Ashbery: 'Oh, and did the red rubber ball ever arrive? We could do something / with them, I just have to figure out what. / Today a stoat came to tea and that was so nice it almost made me cry -'. And here, perhaps, is a way through the impasse.