Ashbery, John

Related Category: American Literature: Biographies

1927–, American poet, b. Rochester, N.Y., grad. Harvard (B.A., 1949), Columbia (M.A., 1951). Ashbery is among the most acclaimed of recent 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 (1975; Pulitzer Prize)—his most celebrated work, Shadow Train (1981), A Wave (1984), April Galleons (1987), And the Stars Were Shining (1994), Chinese Whispers (2002), and Where Shall I Wander (2005). He has also written three plays, The Compromise (1960), The Heroes (1960), and The Philosopher (1964), and coauthored a novel, A Nest of Ninnies (1969). Ashbery is also an art critic and edited the quarterly Art and Literature. Many of his art reviews and essays were collected in Reported Sightings (1989).

See his Selected Prose (2005); studies by D. Lehman, ed. (1980), H. Bloom, ed. (1985), J. Shoptaw (1994), S. M. Schultz, ed. (1995), and D. Herd (2000).