Abstract: Contemporary American Poet John Ashbery bases his consideration of the reality on his meditation on the art world. His poetry is mostly art-oriented, which is largely related with paintings, instead of taking impersonality, politics and emotion as its end. However, he does not totally depend on the mimetic tradition in that his poetry transcends the mimesis, presenting less the visual engagement with paintings than the illusionary encounter with them, an aesthetic principle instilled from the Abstract Expressionist paintings. In this way, his poetry entails an interplay of vision and illusion, in which the vision surfaced exteriorly underlies the illusion captured interiorly, pointing to the uncertainty of meaning and the loss of subjectivity.

Key words: John Ashbery, painting, vision, illusion