John Ashbery

John Ashbery (1927–2017) was an American poet widely considered the most influential American poet of the second half of the twentieth century. Born in Rochester, New York, he studied at Harvard and Columbia and spent many years in France. His 1975 collection Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award—one of only a handful of collections ever to win all three major American poetry prizes in the same year. Ashbery's work is celebrated for its radical formal experimentation, its dense allusiveness, its ironic wit, and its refusal of fixed meaning. He was a member of the New York School of poets alongside Frank O'Hara, Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler. His other major collections include Some Trees (1956), The Tennis Court Oath (1962), Three Poems (1972), and Flow Chart (1991). He published more than twenty collections of poetry over more than six decades. Ashbery received the National Book Foundation's Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2011, the Wallace Stevens Award, the Bollingen Prize, the Frost Medal, and numerous other honours. He taught at Brooklyn College for many years and was a major force in American poetry education.