John Ashbery

John Ashbery
Ashbery in 1975
Ashbery in 1975
BornJohn Lawrence Ashbery
(1927-07-28)July 28, 1927
Rochester, New York, U.S.
DiedSeptember 3, 2017(2017-09-03) (aged 90)
Hudson, New York, U.S.
OccupationPoet, professor, and art critic
EducationHarvard University (BA)
New York University
Columbia University (MA)
Period1949–2017
Literary movementSurrealism, The New York School, Postmodernism
Notable worksSelf-Portrait in a Convex Mirror
Notable awardsMacArthur Fellowship, Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, Guggenheim Fellowship
SpouseDavid Kermani
Signature

John Lawrence Ashbery[1] (July 28, 1927 – September 3, 2017) was an American poet and art critic.[2]

Ashbery is considered the most influential American poet of his time. Oxford University literary critic John Bayley wrote that Ashbery "sounded, in poetry, the standard tones of the age."[3] Langdon Hammer, chair of the English Department at Yale University, wrote in 2008, "No figure looms so large in American poetry over the past 50 years as John Ashbery" and "No American poet has had a larger, more diverse vocabulary, not Whitman, not Pound."[4] Stephanie Burt, a poet and Harvard professor of English, has compared Ashbery to T. S. Eliot, calling Ashbery "the last figure whom half the English-language poets alive thought a great model, and the other half thought incomprehensible".[5]

Ashbery published more than 20 volumes of poetry. Among other awards, he received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award for his collection Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975).[6] In 2007, he became the first living poet to be anthologized by the Library of America. Renowned for its postmodern complexity and opacity, his work still proves controversial. Ashbery said he wished his work to be accessible to as many people as possible, not a private dialogue with himself.[2][7] He also joked that some critics still view him as "a harebrained, homegrown surrealist whose poetry defies even the rules and logic of Surrealism."[8] He reflected: "I’m not very good at explaining my work... I'm unable to do so because I feel that my poetry is the explanation. The explanation of what? Of my thought, whatever that is. As I see it, my thought is both poetry and the attempt to explain that poetry; the two cannot be disentangled."[9]

  1. ^ "Book of Members, 1780–2010: Chapter A" (PDF). American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Retrieved April 25, 2011.
  2. ^ a b Ryzik, Melena (August 27, 2007). "An 80-Year-Old Poet for the MTV Generation". New York Times. Retrieved August 21, 2007.
  3. ^ Bayley, John (August 15, 1991). "Richly Flows Contingency". New York Review of Books. ISSN 0028-7504. Retrieved September 10, 2019.
  4. ^ Hammer, Langdon, "‘But I Digress’", review of Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems, by John Ashbery, New York Times Book Review, April 20, 2008, accessed same day.
  5. ^ Burt, Stephen (March 26, 2008). "John Ashbery a poet for our times". The Times. London. Archived from the original on September 4, 2008. Retrieved May 6, 2010.
  6. ^ "John Ashbery". Poetry Foundation.
  7. ^ NPR interview with Ashbery about his collection Where Shall I Wander – including poem audio. March 19, 2005
  8. ^ Ashbery, John. "On Elizabeth Bishop." Selected Prose. 2005.
  9. ^ "John Ashbery". Library of America.