John Ashbery

John Ashbery

John Lawrence Ashbery (born July 28, 1927) is an American poet. He has published more than twenty volumes of poetry and won nearly every major American award for poetry, including a Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for his collection Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. Renowned for its postmodern complexity and opacity, Ashbery's work still proves controversial. Ashbery has stated that he wishes his work to be accessible to as many people as possible, and not to be a private dialogue with himself. At the same time, he once joked that some critics still view him as "a harebrained, homegrown surrealist whose poetry defies even the rules and logic of Surrealism."

"No figure looms so large in American poetry over the past 50 years as John Ashbery," Langdon Hammer, chairman of the English Department at Yale University, wrote in 2008. "No American poet has had a larger, more diverse vocabulary, not Whitman, not Pound." Stephen 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".

Read more about John Ashbery:  Life, Work, Reviews, Awards and Honors, Further Reading

Famous quotes by john ashbery:

    For it is wretchedness that endures, shedding its cancerous light on all it approaches:
    Words spoken in the heat of passion, that might have been retracted in good time,
    All good intentions, all that was arguable.
    John Ashbery (b. 1927)

    It’s this crazy weather we’ve been having:
    Falling forward one minute, lying down the next
    Among the loose grasses and soft, white, nameless flowers.
    John Ashbery (b. 1927)

    If only the phantom would stop reappearing!
    Business, if you wanted to know, was punk at the opera.
    The heroine no longer appeared in Faust.
    The crowds strolled sadly away.
    John Ashbery (b. 1927)