Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Ashbery dead at 90
NEW YORK— John Ashbery, an enigmatic giant of modern poetry whose energy, daring and boundless command of language raised American verse to brilliant and baffling heights, died Sunday at age 90.
Ashbery, often mentioned as a Nobel Prize candidate, died at his home in Hudson, N.Y. His husband, David Kermani, said his death was from natural causes.
Ashbery was the first living poet to have a volume published by the Library of America dedicated to his work. His 1975 collection, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, was the rare winner of the book world’s unofficial triple crown: the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle prize.
Among a generation of poets that included Richard Wilbur, W. S. Merwin and Adrienne Rich, Ashbery stood out for his audacity and wordplay, for his modernist shifts between high oratory and everyday chatter, for his humour and wisdom and dazzling runs of allusions and sense impressions.
Ashbery also was a well-regarded translator and critic. He translated works by Arthur Rimbaud, Raymond Roussel and others.
His style ranged from rhyming couplets to haiku to blank verse, and his interests were as vast as his gifts for expressing them. As he aged, he became ever more sensitive to mortality and reputation. How to Continue was an elegy for the sexual revolution among gays in the 1960s and ’70s, a party turned tragic by the deadly arrival of AIDS, “a gale (that) came and said / it is time to take all of you away.”