The Double Dream of Spring

One of Ashbery’s most important masterworks: Widely studied, critically admired, and essential to understanding one of the modern era’s most revolutionary poets

The Double Dream of Spring, originally published in 1970, followed the critical success of John Ashbery’s National Book Award–nominated collection Rivers and Mountains and introduced the signature voice—reflective, acute, and attuned to modern language as it is spoken—that just a few years later would carry Ashbery’s Pulitzer Prize–winning masterpiece Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. Ashbery fans and lovers of modern poetry alike will recognize here some of the century’s most anthologized and critically admired works of poetry, including “Soonest Mended,” “Decoy,” “Sunrise in Suburbia,” “Evening in the Country,” the achingly beautiful long poem “Fragment,” and Ashbery’s so-called Popeye poem, the mordant and witty “Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape.”

The Double Dream of Spring helped cement Ashbery’s reputation as a must-read American poet, and no library of modern poetry is complete without it.