Published when he was approaching the age of 50, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror was a major breakthrough after a career marked by relative obscurity, and either lukewarm or outright hostile reviews.

Ashbery developed an early, idiosyncratic, avant-garde poetic style that attracted little critical notice—and the few reviews he did receive were usually negative.

[note 1] Ashbery adopted an avant-garde style for The Tennis Court Oath (1962) at the cost of brutally negative reviews.

Critics derided the book as incomprehensible and absent of any redeeming qualities, which almost drove Ashbery to quit writing poetry altogether.

[1] Asked in 1976 about the widely held opinion that his early poems were "too difficult", if not outright impossible to understand, he replied: At first, I was puzzled and hurt.

Journalist Thomas Vinciguerra described Ashbery's pose as if "[stood] in all hunky glory, hips slightly cocked", wearing a "windowpane shirt open to midchest" and "tight slacks [that] have no belt loops.

"[17] According to Lehman, his change in style reflected the progress of the post-Stonewall gay liberation movement, as Ashbery could present himself as "more visibly and publicly who he was.

"[17] Parmigianino's painting was not reproduced in early editions, a decision lamented by the critic Fred Moramarco, who said readers would be better able to appreciate the "reverberations" between the two works if they could view them simultaneously.

[20] The collection contains 35 poems,[21] comprising a mix of new and previously published works; the latter had appeared in various American literary magazines between November 1972 and April 1975.

Stephen J. Ross called these lines "a cringe-worthy parody of speech" and compared them with other instances from Ashbery's oeuvre of "orientalist" tropes in (purposefully) "bad taste", some more nuanced than others.

"[38] But elsewhere, these instances of authorial "self-assurance" are counterposed and "repeatedly mocked by images of the reader's forgetfulness, lapses of attention, ultimate silence.

[40] Critics generally described Self-Portrait as some of Ashbery's most accessible poetry, especially when compared to his more challenging, avant-garde work like the earlier collection The Tennis Court Oath (1962) or the book-length poem Flow Chart (1991).

For instance, Stephen Paul Miller wrote an essay theorizing that "Self-Portrait" was an elaborate commentary on the Watergate scandal, noting the poem was first published by Poetry in August 1974—the same month Richard Nixon announced his resignation.

"[45] Bloom—a high-profile literary critic best known as the author of The Anxiety of Influence (1973)—had applauded Ashbery's early works and considered him as a "strong" or "great" American poet, a successor to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, and Wallace Stevens.

[47]References to Stevens were commonplace in early reviews of the Self-Portrait collection and, whether they reflected or rejected Bloom's interpretation, they demonstrated his influence in any case.

In 1975, John N. Morris mocked the tone of Bloom's blurb as over-bearing and portentous, sarcastically calling him "solemn and tremendous as History Itself": How very discouraging it sounds—another damned masterpiece!

I suspect that Ashbery in this book is pretty nearly as good as Bloom says he is, and I hope that the dustjacket drums and thunder won't put readers off.

[49]In Susan M. Schultz's reading, Bloom's reviews imposed his own ideas and denigrated any of Ashbery's qualities beyond or contrary to his Stevens-centered analysis.

[50] Schultz interpreted parts of Ashbery's poetry, beginning with "Self-Portrait", as veiled retorts to Bloom and other literary theorists who would narrowly categorize the bounds of his work.

"[55] Although Ashbery, like his peers, "begins with the world of perceived objects, perception itself is problematical for him, and he is never able to rely on the empirical certitudes that nearly all our poets seem to take for granted.

"[57] Reviewing the collection for Time magazine in 1976, Paul Gray wrote: Even Ashbery's staunchest defenders admit that his work is difficult.

According to Paul Auster, few recent books of American poetry had "provoked such unanimous praise and admiration," which was perhaps surprising given the "singularly bad press" for Ashbery's earlier work.

[68] While he had been recognized by a small, "fanatically devoted" following, he was more often dismissed as "obscure, meaningless, and willfully avant-garde" by "the lords of the literary establishment.

[70] In 1998, Nicholas Jenkins of The New York Times described Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror as the work that "fix[ed] him in the poetic firmament—a strange position for one so devoted to mobility and restlessness.

"[71] Years later, Ashbery developed mixed feelings about the title poem of Self-Portrait, finding it to be too much like an essay and too remote in style from the rest of his body of work.

[73] Shortly before his 90th birthday in 2017, by which time he had written 28 volumes of published poetry, biographer Karin Roffman recommended "Self-Portrait" as one of the ten poems by Ashbery that newcomers to his writing should read first.