This chapter offers an interpretation of one of the most remarkable debut collections ever selected for the Yale Series of Younger Poets award—Some Trees by John Ashbery. The reputation of the book as an unconventional debut has dominated the critical response to it, from the early, largely negative judgments by critics such as William Arrowsmith and Donald Hall, to more recent attempts to revalue it by Marjorie Perloff, Vernon Shetley, David Lehman, and others. The chapter argues that Some Trees has been misread both by its detractors and defenders, who tend to stress the ways in which the poems resist interpretation while ignoring many of the ways in which they encourage and support it.
