Ashbery, John [Lawrence]
Ashbery, John [Lawrence]( 1927– ),poet born in Rochester, N.Y., after an A.B. from Harvard and graduate study of French literature at Columbia and New York University became an art and literary critic in France. His first poems, Turandot (1953) and Some Trees (1956),the latter in the Yale Series of Younger Poets, appeared before his expatriation. The later works have been influenced by French surrealism and relate to the abstractions of New York action painters, including Jackson Pollock and Robert Motherwell. They are melodious, dreamlike, and ever-shifting meditations that do not order the exterior world but in solipsistic fashion present the poet's personal associations and sensory responses to it. Opposed to conventional logic, realism, and the idea of a usable past, the poetry cannot be explicated in a traditional way. Ashbery's evocative images and musicality make fragments sensually beautiful, but the entirety of a work...
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