Laura Quinney

Laura Quinney is the author of Literary Power and the Criteria of Truth and The Poetics of Disappointment: Wordsworth to Ashbery. She teaches at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts.

Letter
While I share C.K. Stead’s admiration for Frank O’Hara, I found his comments on John Ashbery misleading and strange (LRB, 23 April). He dismisses Ashbery as pretentious (‘academic’, I suppose) and obscure. This opinion must result from a superficial reading, for Ashbery is not obscure nor devious nor unmeaning. His poems evoke very subtle ranges of experience, and it is a measure of their intellectual...

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