BIOG R A P HY O F

JOH N A SH B E RY
JOHN ASHBERY is recognized as one of the
greatest american poets. He has won nearly every
major american award for poetry, including the
prize, the national book award, the yale younger
poets prize, the bollingen prize, the ruth lily poetry
prize, the griffin international award, and a
MacArthur “Genius” Grant.
•Ashbery’s poetry challenges its readers
to discard all presumptions about the
aims, themes, and stylistic scaffolding of
verse in favor of a literature that reflects
upon the limits of language and the
volatility of consciousness.
• In the New Criterion, William Logan noted: “few poets have so
cleverly manipulated, or just plain tortured, our soiled desire for
meaning. [Ashbery] reminds us that most poets who give us
meaning don’t know what they’re talking about.” The New York
Times Book Review essayist Stephen Koch characterized
Ashbery’s voice as “a hushed, simultaneously incomprehensible
and intelligent whisper with a weird pulsating rhythm that
fluctuates like a wave between peaks of sharp clarity and watery
droughts of obscurity and languor.
•Ashbery’s first book, Some Trees (1956) won the Yale
Younger Poets Prize. The competition was judged by W.H.
Auden, who famously confessed later that he hadn’t
understood a word of the winning manuscript. Ashbery
published a spate of successful and influential collections in
the 1960s and ‘70s,, including The Tennis Court Oath (1962).
The Double Dream of Spring(1970), Self-Portrait in a Convex
Mirror(1975) and Houseboat Days(1977).
•Critics have noted how Ashbery’s verse has taken shape
under the influence of abstract expressionism, a
movement in modern painting stressing
nonrepresentational methods of picturing reality. “
Modern art was the first and most powerful influence on
Ashbery, Helen McNeil declared in the Times Literary
Supplement.”
•He began to write in the 1950s,
American poetry has constrained and
formal while American abstract
expressionist art was vigorously taking
over the heroic responsibilities of the
European avant garde.
•Ashbery’s poems according to Fred Moramarco in the Journal
of Modern Literature , are “verbal canvas” upon which the
poet freely applies the techniques of expressionism.
•Ashbery’s experience as an critic in France during the 1950s
and ‘60s.
•Ashbery’s influences include the Romantic tradition in
American poetry that progressed from Whitman to Wallace
Stevens, called “New York School of poets”.
•Ashbery’s style self- reflexive, multi-phonic, vaguely
narrative, full of both pop culture and high allusion has
become “so influential that its imitators are legion.” Helen
Vendler observed in the New Yorker.
•His poetry is open-ended and multi-various, because life
itself is, he told Bryan Appleyard in the London Times: “I
don’t find any direct statements in life. My poetry imitates
or reproduces the way knowledge or awareness come to me,
which is by fits and starts and indirection. I don’t think
poetry arranged in neat patterns would reflect that situation.
My poetry is disjunct, but then so its life.” I don’t think
poetry arranged in neat patterns would reflect that situation.
My poetry is disjunct, but then so its life.”
•Some critics laud what Paul Auster described in Harper’s as
Asbery’s “ability to undermine our certainties, to articulate
so fully the ambiguous zones of our consciousness.”
•Reflecting upon the critical response to his poem, “Litany,”
Asbery once told ContemporaryAuthors.
•In more recent Ashbery works, such as Girlson the Run (1999),
Chinese Whispers(2002), Where Shall I Wander? (2005), and A
Worldly Country (2007).
•In the Nation, Calvin Bedient stated, “For all his
experimentation, Ashbery writes about happiness and woe.
•Mark Ford, also writing in the Times Literary Supplement,
compared Ashbery’s poetry to Walt Whitman’s.
•Ashbery’s evasions might be seen as motivated by a similar
desire to achieve a greater and more democratic intimacy by
short-circuiting conventional modes of address.”
•Nicholas Jenkins concluded in the New York Times book
Review that Ashbery’s poetry “appeals not because it offers
wisdom in packaged form, but because the ilusiveness and
mysterious promise of his lines remind us that we always have
future and a condition of meaningfulness to start out toward.”
•In 2008, the Library of America published John Ashbery:
Collected Poems, 1956-1987, the first collection of a living
poet ever published by the series.
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