John Ashbery
Playful, erudite American poet regarded by advocates as the equal of Emily Dickinson or TS Eliot
JOHN ASHBERY, who has died aged 90, was perhaps the greatest American poet of the second half of the 20th century. Considered by detractors to be, in his own words, “a hare-brained, home-grown surrealist”, and by advocates to be a poet of the stature of Dickinson and Eliot, Ashbery expanded the language of poetry to register its historical and cultural moment in all its richness and complexity. In his playful, erudite, and often profoundly melancholy poems, one is as likely to encounter Popeye as Parmigianino, Daffy Duck as Thomas Wyatt. A poem from his most recent book, Commotion of the Birds (2017) featured the following characteristic line: “Exeunt the Kardashians.”
Ashbery’s greatest poems offer intense representations of the experience of time’s passage and the process of recollection, while providing startlingly vivid accounts of the physical world. His works recognise the inability of language to communicate exactly, but present the very limitation of the medium as an opportunity to collaborate with the reader in the making of meaning. As he wrote in his masterpiece, Paradoxes and Oxymorons: “And the poem / Has set me softly down beside you. The poem is you.”
John Ashbery was born in Rochester, New York, on July 28 1927, the son of a farmer and a biology teacher. He grew up on a farm in Sodus, upstate New York. His relationship with his parents was problematic, and he spent some of his childhood living with his grandparents on Lake Ontario. His grandfather, a professor at Rochester College who owned an extensive library of classics, was a nurturing influence. His younger brother, Richard, died of leukaemia in 1939.
Ashbery was a precocious child. He wrote his first poem at eight, which read: “The tall haystacks are great sugar mounds / they are the fairies’ camping grounds.” Having concluded that this poem was so good that he had exhausted his potential in the medium (“I couldn’t go on from this pinnacle”), at nine he decided to become a surrealist painter. It was only in his teens that he returned to poetry; while still at Deerfield Academy, he had poems accepted by Poetry, America’s most famous poetry magazine, though the achievement was somewhat tarnished by the fact that they had been submitted by a plagiarising room-mate.
After studying at Harvard, where he joined the editorial board of the Advocate, Ashbery moved to New York in 1949 for graduate study at Columbia. There he became better acquainted with fellow Harvard alumni Frank O’hara and Kenneth Koch, and came to know James Schuyler and Barbara Guest, other prominent members of what was soon termed the New York School of Poets.
In reality it described little more than a group of friends; unlike earlier avant-garde groups, they shared no manifesto, no defined set of aesthetic principles, but rather a radical openness to a multitude of traditions and practices. As Ashbery once remarked, “our program is the absence of a program.”
There was, however, a close association between these poets and the flourishing New York art world. O’hara went on to be a curator at the Met, while Ashbery wrote art criticism for a number of publications, including Partisan Review, Newsweek, and ARTNEWS. A selection of his criticism was published in 1989 as Reported Sightings, a volume which illustrates the great influence the visual arts had upon his poetry.
His first collection, Some Trees (1956), is an elegant, endlessly puzzling volume, profoundly influenced by WH Auden, who selected the manuscript for publication in the Yale Younger Poets series, and on whom Ashbery had written his undergraduate thesis at Harvard. The preoccupations of Ashbery’s many later masterpieces are present in germinal form in this volume, which employs traditional forms, such as the sonnet, sestina, and pantoum, often in mischievous and subversive ways.
The volume was also a striking departure from the predominant modes in American poetry at time, particularly the confessional poetry of Robert Lowell. As Ashbery was gay, it has been suggested by some critics that his idiosyncratic, elusive forms of expression were ways of communicating a coded critique of the entrenched homophobia of the “unendurable age” in which he found himself.
As The Thinnest Shadow supple, since you can’t be gay.” Ashbery himself found this a limited perspective from which to puts it: “Be view his work, as the title of a recent poem, Queer Subtext, indicates.
In 1955 Ashbery left New York for Paris on a Fulbright Scholarship to write a never-to-be-completed PHD thesis on the French proto-surrealist writer Raymond Roussel. It was while in Paris, living with the French poet Pierre Martory, that Ashbery began work on what remains his most controversial volume, The Tennis Court Oath (1962). Influenced by the techniques of cubist artists and the aleatory music of John Cage, the poems marked a radical departure from his earlier work. The following lines give a sense of the book’s sometimes forbidding difficulty: “steel /infected bumps the screws / everywhere wells / abolished top ill-lit / scarecrow falls”. Some of Ashbery’s most passionate advocates deemed the book a failed experiment, yet for many poets it remains one of the most innovative texts of the 20th century.
For his next book, Rivers and Mountains (1966), Ashbery sought “a kind of fence-sitting raised to the level of an aesthetic ideal”. In the final poem of the book, The Skaters, the dramatic disjunctions found in The Tennis Court Oath are joined by dreamlike discursive passages, fantastical voyages and self-reflective commentaries on writing, in one of the great poems of childhood and the development of the self.
After the death of his father, Ashbery returned to America in 1964; his arrival was marked by a large party at Andy Warhol’s Factory. In the early 1970s he began working as a teacher in creative writing at Brooklyn College, an experience he found more laborious than rewarding. Nevertheless, he largely made his living from teaching for the remainder of his working life, holding numerous academic positions, including as Charles P Stevenson Jr Professor of Languages and Literature at Bard College. In 1989 he gave the Charles Norton Eliot Lectures at Harvard, published in 2000 as Other Traditions.
After the publication of The Double Dream of Spring (1970), Three Poems (1972) – a collection of long prose poems – marked another significant development. Then, after The Vermont Notebook (1975), a diaristic collaboration with the artist Joe Brainard, he began work on what was to become his best-known poem.
Self-portrait in a Convex Mirror ostensibly takes as its subject Parmigianino’s 16th-century mannerist masterpiece, but in fact uses it as a springboard for a series of penetrating meditations on love, friendship, art, and the passage of time, in a work of towering ambition and achievement. The volume of the same title received an unprecedented “triple crown” in 1975, winning the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics’ Circle Award.
Of his subsequent books, Houseboat Days (1977), As We Know (1979), and Flow Chart (1991) are widely acknowledged as major works, and his long poems, Litany and A Wave, rank among his most significant achievements. Following Flow Chart, Ashbery produced a book of poems roughly every couple of years.
Perhaps his greatest final publication was an exquisite translation of Rimbaud’s Illuminations (2011) – the culmination of a lifetime of translation from French, which included, among many others, works by Martory, Roussel, Reverdy and de Chirico.
Ashbery was the recipient of numerous awards and in 2008 the first volume of his monumental Collected Poems was published by the Library of America, making him the first living poet to receive such an honour.
He is survived by his husband, David Kermani.