In his essay for the PN Review issue celebrating F.T. P rince, John Ashbery claims that ‘the essence of Prince’ is to be found in three early poems: ‘The Babiaantje’, ‘The Moonflower’ and ‘Cefalù’. Ashbery praises these poems’ ‘simplicity’, ‘mystery’ and ‘cool elegiac smoothness’, attributes which lead him to compare Prince to Matthew Arnold and Walter Savage Landor. This is, to say the least, an idiosyncratic account of Prince's qualities. For many of his admirers, the enduring interest of Prince's poetry lies in its complexity, its often luxuriously rich surface, its coiling, reticulated syntax and lavish, varied diction. Ashbery's atypical tribute seems all the more puzzling when considering the various ways in which he was himself influenced by Prince's poetry, few of which can be said to relate to simplicity, mystery or cool elegiac smoothness. This apparent disjunction between the terms of Ashbery's appreciation of Prince, and the ways in which Prince's work makes itself felt in Ashbery's own poems, is the focus of this essay, which explores several possible explanations for this disjunction. The significant aesthetic convergences and differences elaborated in the extensive correspondence between the two poets suggest that, in his critical writing on Prince, Ashbery may have been guided by a desire to misdirect readers looking to trace forms of influence between the two poets. In a more generous light, it might be said that he simply avoided writing about those of Prince's poems he considered unsuccessful. Most plausible and revealing, however, is the possibility that the most fully realised, and in some senses most praiseworthy, elements of Prince's poetry—as embodied in those curious short poems Ashbery mentions—were, in their very completeness, the least useful for Ashbery's own work. Ashbery's remark about John Clare's handful of truly successful poems might be applied to his strange grouping of Prince's short lyrics: ‘These are rare instances of perfection in a poet whose habit, one might even say whose strength, was imperfection’. Of greater practical importance than these poems of unimpeachable perfection, in Ashbery's view, were those moments in which a sudden, unexpected modernist gesture troubles the otherwise classical surfaces of Prince's poems, disturbing their otherwise conventional surfaces.