John Ashbery Biography Quotes 5 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
John Lawrence Ashbery was born on July 28, 1927, in Rochester, New York, and spent his childhood on a fruit farm near Lake Ontario. The rural setting, combined with intensive early reading, fostered an imagination that would later become one of the most distinctive in American poetry. After early schooling in upstate New York, he attended Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts, where he began to publish poems and to take poetry seriously as a vocation. He continued to Harvard University, graduating in 1949. At Harvard he met a circle of lifelong friends who shaped his sensibility and public career: Frank O Hara and Kenneth Koch, fellow poets whose wit and experimental daring matched his own; James Schuyler, a close companion and later collaborator; and Barbara Guest, another key figure of what came to be known as the New York School. Ashbery contributed to the Harvard Advocate and, after Harvard, pursued graduate study at Columbia University, further grounding his literary ambitions in a broad humanistic education.

Emergence and the New York School
In the 1950s Ashbery moved to New York City, where poets and painters were inventing a new idiom of American art. The vitality of painters such as Jane Freilicher, Larry Rivers, and Fairfield Porter mingled with the verbal inventiveness of Ashbery and his friends, and this cross-pollination shaped the atmosphere in which his early work took form. His first collection, Some Trees, was selected by W. H. Auden for the Yale Younger Poets Prize, a crucial imprimatur that announced his arrival. Ashbery, O Hara, Koch, Schuyler, and Guest forged a poetics that embraced collage, conversational cadence, and sudden shifts of tone, while resisting tidy closure. With Harry Mathews they helped edit the little magazine Locus Solus, an outlet for poetry, translations, and criticism that reflected their cosmopolitan tastes.

Art Criticism and Years in France
Ashbery won a Fulbright and moved to France in the mid-1950s, spending nearly a decade largely in Paris. There he absorbed currents of European modernism and wrote art criticism for publications including ARTnews. His criticism displayed the same alertness to shifts in perception that marked his poems, and it strengthened his ties to painters and to the avant-garde more generally. He also began translating French literature, bringing into English the work of writers who mattered to him, such as Pierre Reverdy and Raymond Roussel; later he would also translate Arthur Rimbaud. Collections from this period and shortly after, including The Tennis Court Oath and Rivers and Mountains, solidified his reputation for formal audacity and tonal range.

Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror and Recognition
The publication of Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror in 1975 was a turning point. The title poem, a meditation on Parmigianino s Mannerist painting, triangulates looking, language, and consciousness with a precision and slipperiness that became emblematic of Ashbery s art. The book received the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award, an unprecedented convergence that affirmed the cultural centrality of his project. Alongside the triumphs, the loss of friends such as Frank O Hara intensified the sense of an evolving New York School, with Ashbery increasingly recognized as its most prominent and protean figure.

Later Work and Teaching
Ashbery sustained a prolific output across five decades, ranging from the crystalline brevity of Houseboat Days to the expansive meditation of Flow Chart and the late selected volume Notes from the Air. He taught and lectured widely, and eventually joined the faculty at Bard College, where his presence as a teacher and colleague influenced generations of younger poets and artists. Throughout these years he continued to write art criticism and essays, often returning to the painters and artworks that had spurred his imagination from the beginning.

Style, Method, and Collaborations
Ashbery s poems are known for their quicksilver shifts of diction, their refusal of single authoritative voice, and their generosity toward the stray remark or overlooked detail. He championed an art that could register the textures of daily life without sacrificing philosophical reach. Collaboration, too, was central: with James Schuyler he co-wrote the comic novel A Nest of Ninnies, an experiment in voice and social observation that mirrored the conversational dynamism of their circle. His friendships with Koch, Schuyler, Guest, and O Hara, and his dialogues with painters like Freilicher, Rivers, and Porter, kept his work porous to other arts.

Personal Life
Ashbery was openly gay and spent much of his adult life with his partner, later husband, the scholar David Kermani. Their partnership, both personal and intellectual, helped steward Ashbery s papers, translations, and bibliographic record, and supported the day-to-day rhythms that enabled his sustained creativity. In later years they made a home in Hudson, New York, where Ashbery wrote, collected art and books, and received a steady stream of students, writers, and curators.

Legacy and Final Years
Ashbery s influence on American poetry is vast. He showed that abstraction and feeling could coexist, that humor need not cancel depth, and that a poem could be an active theater of consciousness rather than a report from a fixed self. He received numerous honors over the course of his life and remained a touchstone for poets, critics, and visual artists. John Ashbery died on September 3, 2017, in Hudson. The body of work he left behind, shaped in companionship with figures such as O Hara, Koch, Schuyler, Guest, Freilicher, Rivers, Porter, and Kermani, continues to enlarge the possibilities of the American poem.

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