"The essential subjects of Ashbery's poetry - subjectivity and time as we all experience them - are themselves general and elusive; and though in passing it says a good deal about them, its means are in the end mimetic rather than discursive. The intrusion of "any particular reality" could only compromise its radically precarious and indeterminate sttus which, together with the faultless connectedness of its surface, makes Ashbery's work a wholly original poetic analogue for being alive."
(Nicholas Everett, The Times Literary Supplement, 12th February 1993)

"This is cosmopolitan, surreal verse that constantly shifts direction, like someone flipping from one TV channel to the next...Beneath the wild exuberance of the language, I catch the voice of a man who's working life out as he goes along, looking for meaning despite knowing how temporary everything is. This is a book to be savoured, soaked in, the best book of poetry this year, bar nothing."
(Steven Waling, City Life Manchester, 4th November 1992)

"What Hotel Lautremont confirms is that Ashbery stages arguments in order to clear the way for a self that is not pre-formed and settled, but that startlingly forms and reforms under the pressure of circumstance. The result is poetry fully and startlingly engaged with the way things happen, and a potentially far-reaching practice."
(David Herd, New Statesman and Society, 4th December 1992)

"The career of a great writer must be one of constant self-renewal, and John Ashbery's most recent collection, Hotel Lautremont, provides evidence of his continuing poetic development. The epic intent of his previous volume, Flow Chart (Carcanet, 1991), has been replaced here by the more characteristic mood of his lyrics and elegies; but these are shorter poems which display an increased command of language and of form. Stemming in part from Mallarme and in part from Whitman, Ashbery's work creates a tension in which the fine networks of linguistic reverie are balanced by the stong sense of an American tradition."
(Peter Ackroyd, The Times Literary Supplement, 4th December 1992)