By 1984, David Lehman said that Ashbery was "widely considered America's most significant contemporary poet" and that, since Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, "this allegedly hermetic poet has won a genuine and genuinely avid audience for his work." Lehman reported that Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror had by then sold 36,000 copies in hardcover and paperback editions. 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. From that point, even his best critics began to celebrate him in nakedly chauvinistic terms as part of an 'American' line, stretching back to the Emerson of 'Circles'."
