the criticism from clive james is not a critique of ashbery so much as it is about the poetry establishment or poetry industry james is saying that it converts promising poets like ashbery into product factories and that the product is deemed by the establishment to be amenable to further reshaping by the industry to suit its purposes that's what james says but what he is getting at is praise for ashbery rather than the negative that was suggested above by sighrik that ashbery could have produced more great stuff if he had not been so converted by the industry i would say that this is an important piece of criticism on ashbery to the extent that those who consider themselves to be working outside the industry oddly this includes many university professors have come to view ashbery as something less than the real thing or that he became part of the established industry because he was not a true innovator james's suggestion is that the conventional university attitude toward ashbery is not fair or accurate even though it is a bit roundabout i would put the james critique back in the article