"As We Know, John Ashbery's eighth collection, proves the poet to be as fertile and fresh as ever...He is a challenging, adventurous and cultivated poet and a perfect antidote to the more complacent, hackneyed and tradition-shackled practices in contemporary verse."
(Dennis O'Driscoll, The Sunday Tribune, 7th June 1981)

"The poems in [Ashbery's] As We Know have a quality of pure mesmerism. The long 'Litany' especially, written in double columns, for two voices which we are meant to hear or overhear simultaneously but independently, is a stunning achievement...it has a power of verbal fascination which keeps drawing the reader back."
(Robert Nye, The Times, 9th August 1981)

"Since the death of Robert Lowell, the title of most important American poet has been on offer to John Ashbery. In 'Litany', the magnificent long poem that begins As We Know, Ashbery has taken up that title while declining the magisterial stance that usually goes with even an unofficial laureateship. Only late Wallace Stevens and the Auden of In Praise of Limestone can stand comparison to 'Litany''s great meditation on the incomplete metamorphoses of the middle phase of life. In 'Litany', we are lost, but not in a dark wood. We wander in Ashbery's recurrent images of blandly beautiful suburbia; or we contemplate the foot of a purgatorial hill, ignoring and then anointing its edge"; or we gaze at a sunset alluvial landscape or shipwreck-without-ship described as natural scenes but also taken from Caspar David Freidrich paintings. "
(Helen McNeil, TLS, 5th June 1981)