Paradoxes and Oxymorons (Critical Overview)

Critical Overview

Shadow Train (1981), the collection in which “Paradoxes and Oxymorons” appears, received mixed reviews. In his study of Ashbery’s poetry On the Outside Looking Out, critic John Shoptaw calls “Paradoxes and Oxymorons” the most popular poem in Shadow Train and notes that at one point Ashbery considered making it the title poem of the collection but then thought better of it when he realized that many readers might not know what an oxymoron was. Shoptaw writes that “The poem itself voices Ashbery’s populist impulse to reach the common reader, who thinks poems are constructed on many interpretive levels.” In his essay on Ashbery for American Writers, Shoptaw says that “Although Shadow Train is dwarfed by earlier volumes such as Three Poems or As We Know, it may be the right place to begin for the reader who wants to learn Ashbery’s alphabet.” Vernon Shetley, on the other hand, cautions new Ashbery readers not to begin with Shadow Train, writing that “it occupies a curious position in the evolving body of his [Ashbery’s] work. This collection marks another peculiar twist in a protean career, another of the seemingly willful swerves from his natural predispositions that discomfit his admirers almost as much as his detractors.” Ultimately, however, Shetley approves of the collection, writing that Shadow Train shows Ashbery “if not at his most daring and expansive, certainly at his most masterful.” Later in the same article, he remarks that “Shadow Train is a permanent addition to American poetry.”

Reviewing the volume for Commentary, Robert Richman isn’t as kind. Richman claims that Shadow Train “parodies the national mood of retrenchment and specifically the new conservatism of form and representation in the arts.” Writing that “the autonomy of language takes on an especially jejune cast” in the collection, Richman argues against Ashbery boosters, such as critic Helen Vendler, and suggests that the poet’s popularity is undeserved and little more than a con game in which many people willingly participate.