Elevated poetry to brilliant, and baffling, heights
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 early Sunday at age 90.
Mr. Ashbery, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and often mentioned as a Nobel candidate, died at his home in Hudson, New York. His husband, David Kermani, said his death was from natural causes.
Few poets were so exalted in their lifetimes. Mr. Ashbery was the first living poet to have a volume published by the Library of America dedicated exclusively to his work. His 1975 collection, “SelfPortrait 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. In 2011, he was given a National Humanities Medal and credited with changing “how we read poetry.”
Among a generation of poets that included Richard Wilbur, W. S. Merwin and Adrienne Rich, Mr. Ashbery stood out for his audacity and for his wordplay, for his modernist shifts between high oratory and everyday chatter, for his humor and wisdom and dazzling runs of allusions and sense impressions.
“No figure looms so large in American poetry over the past 50 years as John Ashbery,” Langdon Hammer wrote in The New York Times in 2008. “Ashbery’s phrases always feel newly minted; his poems emphasize verbal surprise and delight, not the ways that linguistic patterns restrict us. “
Writing for Slate, the critic and poet Meghan O’Rourke advised readers “not to try to understand the poems but to try to take pleasure from their arrangement, the way you listen to music.”
Interviewed by The Associated Press in 2008, Mr. Ashbery joked that if he could turn his name into a verb, “to Ashbery,” it would mean “to confuse the hell out of people.”
Mr. Ashbery was born in Rochester, New York, in 1927 and remembered himself as a lonely child and bookish child, haunted by the early death of his younger brother and by his attraction to other boys. Mr. Ashbery grew up on an apple farm in the nearby village of Sodus, where it snowed often enough to inspire his first poem, “The Battle,” written at age 8 and a fantasy about a fight between bunnies and snowflakes. He was so satisfied with the poem that he didn’t write another until boarding school, the Deerfield Academy, when his work was published in the school paper.