John Ashbery (1927-2017) was an American poet and art critic, and considered one of the most influential poets in contemporary American literature. Ashbery is often associated with the New York School, an informal movement of arts and literature characterized by the surreal and the avant-garde. Other of the School’s prominent members – including Kenneth Koch and Frank O’Hara – were his classmates at Harvard, and like them, he took a serious interest in art as well as literature. His poems are often imbued with a stream-of-consciousness style and are notoriously characterized by a startling disjunction of syntax, a prevalence of puns, whimsy and wit, and jarring shifts in register and tone. With more than 20 volumes of poetry to his name, Ashbery won a number of top literary prizes in his lifetime, including the Yale Younger Poets Prize (1956), the National Book Award for Poetry (1975) and the Bollingen Prize in Poetry (1986).
John Ashbery (1927-2017) was an American poet and art critic, and considered one of the most influential poets in contemporary American literature. Ashbery is often associated with the New York School, an informal movement of arts and literature characterized by the surreal and the avant-garde. Other of the School’s prominent members – including Kenneth Koch and Frank O’Hara – were his classmates at Harvard, and like them, he took a serious interest in art as well as literature. His poems are often imbued with a stream-of-consciousness style and are notoriously characterized by a startling disjunction of syntax, a prevalence of puns, whimsy and wit, and jarring shifts in register and tone. With more than 20 volumes of poetry to his name, Ashbery won a number of top literary prizes in his lifetime, including the Yale Younger Poets Prize (1956), the National Book Award for Poetry (1975) and the Bollingen Prize in Poetry (1986).
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