Ashbery, John
Ashbery, John ( 1927 – ),American poet, born in New York. He graduated from Harvard in 1949 , by which time he had already composed the title poem of his first volume, Song Trees, which was published in the Yale Younger Poets series edited by W. H. Auden in 1956 . Ashbery spent most of the following decade in Paris, where his work grew more experimental and disjunctive. His second collection, The Tennis Court Oath ( 1962 ), is his most radical, and has proved an important influence on the development of the American school of the 1970s which became known as ‘Language Poetry’. Ashbery did not achieve canonical status until the publication of his sixth volume, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror ( 1975 ). He was the first of the so-called ‘New York School’—normally seen as comprising Frank O'Hara , Kenneth Koch , and James Schuyler —to achieve wide recognition. His poetry is...
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