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TEXT FOUR Just asNorman Mailer, John Updike and Philip Roth were at various times regarded asthe greatest American novelist since the second world war, John Ashbery andRobert Lowell vied for the title of greatest American poet. Yet the two mencould not be more different. Lowell was a public figure who engaged withpolitics-in 1967 he marched shoulder-to-shoulder with Mailer in protest againstthe Vietnam war, as described in Mailers novel The Armies of theNight . Lowell took on substantial themes and envisioned himself as atragic, heroic figure, fighting against his own demons. Mr Ashberys verse, by contrast, is morebeguilingly casual. In his hands, the making of a poem can feel like thetumbling of dice on a table top. Visible on the page is a delicately playfulstrewing of words, looking to engage with each other in a shyly puzzledfashion. And there is an element of Dada-like play in his unpredictability ofaddress with its perpetual shifting of tones. Lowell, whodied in 1977 at the age of 60, addressed the world head on. By contrast, MrAshbery, who celebrated his 80th birthday earlier this year, glances wryly atthe world and its absurdities. In this edition of his later poems, asubstantial gathering of verses selected from six volumes published over thepast 20 years, his poetry does not so much consist of themes to be explored ascomic routines to be improvised. He mocks the very idea of the gravity ofpoetry itself. His tone can be alarmingly inconsequential, as if the reader isthere to be perpetually wrong-footed. He shifts easily from the elevated to thework-a-day. His poems are endlessly digressive and there are often echoes ofother poets in his writings, though these always come lightly at the reader, asthough they were scents on the breeze. | 
