John Ashbery

Home > People > Literature and the Arts > American Literature: Biographies

Ashbery, John [Lawrence] (1927–), poet born in Rochester, N.Y., after an A.B. from Harvard and graduate study of French literature at Columbia and New York University became an art and literary critic in France. His first poems, Turandot (1953) and Some Trees (1956),the latter in the Yale Series of Younger Poets, appeared before his expatriation. The later works have been influenced by French surrealism and relate to the abstractions of New York action painters, including Jackson Pollock and Robert Motherwell. They are melodious, dreamlike, and ever‐shifting meditations that do not order the exterior world but in solipsistic fashion present the poet's personal associations and sensory responses to it. Opposed to conventional logic, realism, and the idea of a usable past, the poetry cannot be explicated in a traditional way. Ashbery's evocative images and musicality make fragments sensually beautiful, but the entirety of a work is opaque, lacking sequential development in syntax or theme. He has published more than twenty collections, including The Poems (1960); The Tennis Court Oath (1962); Rivers and Mountains (1966); Selected Poems (1967); Three Madrigals (1968); Sunrise in Suburbia (1968); 77, Fragment (1969); The Double Dream of Spring (1970); Three Poems (1972); Self‐Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975, National Book Award, Nation‐al Book Critics Circle Award, Pulitzer Prize); Houseboat Days (1977); As We Know (1979); Shadow Train (1981); A Wave (1984); April Galleons (1987); Flow Chart (1991), a 216‐page poem displaying Ashbery making the stuff of his poetry from the midst of the daily minutiae of television watching, telephone calls, and other common interruptions; and Hotel Lautréamont (1993), a meditative series of lyrics. Recent collections include Chinese Whispers (2002) and 100 Muliple-Choice Questions (2002). He has also published a novel (written with James Schuyler), A Nest of Ninnies (1969), a parody of modern U.S. life as seen through the experiences of two vacuous suburban families; and has written two one‐act plays, The Heroes (1952), a light‐hearted presentation of classical mythology in modern times, and The Philosopher (1962), a travesty of conventional detective story drama, and a three‐act play, The Compromise (1956). As a frequent analyst of art, he was one of two critics to write a book on Fairfield Porter (1982). Other Traditions (2001) collects his Charles Eliot Norton lectures on six writers who have been inspirational to him.

John Ashbery 1927–, American poet, b. Rochester, N.Y., grad. Harvard (B.A., 1949), Columbia (M.A., 1951). Ashbery is among the most acclaimed contemporary American poets. During the 1960s and 70s he was one of the so-called New York school of poets, which also included Frank O'Hara , Kenneth Koch , and James Schuyler. Influenced early in his career by the method and music of John Cage , Ashbery has called his writing technique "managed chance." His poems are experimental in style and syntax, strongly visual, and narrative, but typically complex and somewhat obscure. His collections include Some Trees (1956), Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, his most celebrated work (1975; Pulitzer Prize), Shadow Train (1981), A Wave (1984), April Galleons (1987), And the Stars Were Shining (1994), Chinese Whispers (2002), Where Shall I Wander (2005), and Planisphere (2009). He also has written two book-length poems, Flow Chart (1991) and Girls on the Run (1999); three plays, The Compromise (1960), The Heroes (1960), and The Philosopher (1964); and coauthored a novel, A Nest of Ninnies (1969). Ashbery is an art critic as well, and edited the quarterly Art and Literature. Many of his art reviews and essays were collected in Reported Sightings (1989). He also has translated works by such French writers as Pierre Reverdy, Raymond Roussel, Max Jacob, and Arthur Rimbaud.

Bibliography: See his Selected Prose (2005); studies by D. Shapiro (1979), D. Lehman, ed. (1980) and as author (1999), H. Bloom, ed. (1985 and 2004), J. Shoptaw (1994), S. M. Schultz, ed. (1995), D. Herd (2000), G. Ward (2d ed. 2001), K. Bartczak (2006), A. DuBois (2006), and J. E. Vincent (2007).

Ashbery, John (1927– ), American poet, born in New York. He graduated from Harvard in 1949, by which time he had already composed the title poem of his first volume, Song Trees, which was published in the Yale Younger Poets series edited by Auden in 1956. Ashbery spent most of the following decade in Paris, where his work grew more experimental and disjunctive. His second and most radical collection, The Tennis Court Oath (1962), became an important influence on the development of ‘Language Poetry’. Ashbery achieved canonical status with his sixth volume, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975). His recent Selected Poems were published in the UK in 2002. He was the first of the so-called ‘New York School’—which included Frank O'Hara, Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler—to achieve wide recognition. His poetry is characterized by its openness to the vagaries of consciousness, its wry, beguiling lyricism, and its innovative use of forms such as the pantoum and the sestina. H. Bloom has frequently declared Ashbery to be the most significant poet since W. Stevens.