[1] Scott Mahler wrote in the Los Angeles Times: "Ashbery's poetry has been called mysterious, original, difficult, dream-like, Romantic, a part of the continuum of American poetry that includes Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane.

Flow Chart is easily all of these things... Ashbery has shown us again that he can go more than the distance we expect of great poets, but neither the terrain he covers nor the course he takes is altogether very exciting.

Flow Chart is a great accomplishment, but it sometimes reads more like a big effort than a real tour de force.

In manically articulate free verse of long, supple lines, he conjures a secular landscape dotted with shadows of ancient gods... Ashbery (Some Trees) weaves a haunted, haunting music around ... big questions, squeezing joy, ennui, despair, hope and a thirst for belonging out of ordinary experience.

[3] Writing in Contemporary Literature, critic Nick Lolordo contends that Flow Chart is an "exemplary text" that points to Ashbery's central position in twentieth century poetry as an heir to T. S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens.