“No figure looms so large in American poetry over the past 50 years.” So said critic Langdon Hammer of John Ashbery, whose distinctive, difficult compositions, in the words of poet Paul Muldoon, “not only changed the rules of the game but also remapped the field on which the game was played.” Originally associated with the so-called “New York School” of poets—which included Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler, and Barbara Guest—Ashbery had outgrown that label by the 1970s. He rose to prominence with the collection Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975), often considered his masterpiece, which won the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Next came Houseboat Days (1977), a collection the critic Marjorie Perloff called “the most exciting, most original book of poems to have appeared in the 1970s.” Ashbery remained prolific for the rest of the century and until his 2017 death, and forged a body of work that comprised more than 30 books of poetry written over six decades.

Ashbery’s poems are famous for their difficulty and obscurity, a quality which has divided critics. W.H. Auden, who in 1955 selected Ashbery’s collection Some Trees for the Yale Younger Poets prize, later admitted that he “hadn’t understood a word of it.” “Those who expect poetry to evoke a specific experience or event, real or fictional,” wrote critic Nicholas Everett, “will always find Ashbery’s work frustrating or just dull.” Ashbery himself was keenly aware of his reputation, but nevertheless embraced ambiguity. “This is the way that life appears to me,” he said in a 1983 interview, “the way that experience happens.” He nevertheless maintained a sense of humor about the indecipherability of his work: “I often wonder if I am suffering from some mental dysfunction,” he once said, “because of how weird and baffling my poetry seems to so many people and sometimes to me too.”

Scholars have made various attempts to identify core themes or messages in Ashbery’s work. Many have emphasized his apparent interest in the act of creation, a preoccupation reflected in self-referential poems that seem to analyze their own composition in real time. Describing Houseboat Days, Perloff commented that “Ashbery has come to write, in the poet’s most implicitly ironic gesture, almost exclusively about his own poems, the ones he is writing as he writes about them.” Others have identified, particularly in his later work, an elegiac strand. Some have claimed, as did poet and critic Calvin Bedient, that “for all his experimentation, Ashbery writes (as the important writers have always done) about happiness and woe.” Still others have identified the apparent incoherence and inconclusiveness of Ashbery’s poems as a reflection of those same qualities in modern life, a sentiment supported by Ashbery’s own description of his approach to composition. “I don’t find any direct statements in life,” he said. “My poetry imitates or reproduces the way knowledge or awareness come to me, which is by fits and starts and by indirection…My poetry is disjunct, but then so is life.” Yet Ashbery was quick to disarm any critic who proposed the existence of too specific a message or agenda in his work: “there is no message,” he claimed, “nothing I want to tell the world particularly except what I am thinking when I am writing…I am more interested in the movement among ideas than in the ideas themselves, the way one goes from one point to another rather than the destination or the origin.”

While many have criticized his poetry’s inscrutability as a barrier to readers, Ashbery maintained that his work was aimed at a wide audience, that it “was not written not to be read.” More forgiving critics have seen the obscurity of his composition as a democratic feature. In reviewing Ashbery’s epic poem Flow Chart, Lawrence Joseph claimed that the work is “a catalogue…endlessly expansive and open to interpretation, encompassing within its subject matter—well, as much as the poet may imagine.” If his poems are difficult, claimed Ashbery himself, it is because they reflect “the difficulty of our own thinking…in that way, they are, I think, accessible if anyone cares to access them.”

Ashbery’s poetry is defined by his unique style, immediately recognizable and widely imitated. In the words of critic Stephen Koch, an Ashbery poem contains “a weird pulsating rhythm that fluctuates like a wave between peaks of sharp clarity and watery droughts of obscurity and languor.” A key element of this style was the poet’s synthesis of “high” and “low”—he flitted between elegant literary language and everyday, colloquial speech, oscillating in tone and vocabulary from stanza to stanza, line to line. The initial inspiration for this quality was W.H. Auden, whom Ashbery called “the first big influence on my work.” “What immediately struck me,” he described, “was [Auden’s] use of colloquial speech—I didn’t think you were supposed to do that in poetry.” At the heart of Ashbery’s use of the colloquial was an attempt to escape what he saw as the artificiality of traditional forms. “It seems to me that we are most ourselves when we are talking, and we talk in a very irregular and antiliterary way,” he explained. “The pathos and liveliness of ordinary human communication is poetry to me.”

Ashbery’s other poetic influences included Wallace Stevens, Keats, Clare, Laura Riding, Raymond Roussel, the seventeenth-century Metaphysical poets, and the French Surrealists. He also took inspiration from prose authors: of Proust, for instance, he claimed that “one ends up feeling sadder and wiser in equal proportions when one is finished reading him—I can no longer look at the world in quite the same way.” Ashbery also drew on music, specifically the avant-garde compositions of John Cage, whom he discovered after moving to New York. Especially important was Ashbery’s interest in visual art. His first passion, before poetry, was painting. In New York, he met artists like Larry Rivers and Jane Freilicher, and, like the rest of the New York School Poets, he was deeply influenced by abstract expressionism. Modern art was, according to critic Helen McNeil, the “most powerful influence on Ashbery…When he began to write in the 1950s, American poetry was constrained and formal while American abstract-expressionist art was vigorously taking over the heroic responsibilities of the European avant-garde.”

Like his fellow New York School poet Frank O’Hara, Ashbery composed poems spontaneously, in a variety of settings and circumstances. This was a technique born of necessity: for much of his career, financial constraints demanded that he maintain a regular job (first as an art critic, then as a college professor), which limited the time he could dedicate to his poetry. “I’ve conditioned myself to write at almost any time,” he said. And yet he never turned away from his art completely—“I feel that poetry is going on all the time inside, an underground stream.” Ashbery’s inspiration could derive from almost anything, any passing thought, any detail from daily life, and often snippets of conversations overheard on the street. In explaining his method of composition, he described his poetry as the product of what felt like another voice, distinct from his own, which emerged when he began to write and almost dictated the words to him. As Ashbery aged, he reduced editing to a minimum, hewing as close to his initial compositions as possible so as not to “falsify” the “original voice” through editing.

Ashbery was born on July 28, 1927, in Rochester, New York, but grew up on his family’s farm in the rural town of Sodus. His childhood was lonely, a fact compounded by the death of his brother, from leukemia, when Ashbery was just nine. The highlight of his early life were visits to the Victorian home of his grandfather, a professor at the University of Rochester. In his grandfather’s expansive library, Ashbery discovered his first literary loves, the long novels of the Victorian era’s foremost authors, including Dickens, Thackeray, and George Eliot. After an initial foray into painting, in high school Ashbery turned to poetry, which came more naturally, and printed his first work in a school publication.

He enrolled at Harvard in 1945, where he published poems in The Advocate. At Harvard he met Kenneth Koch, whom he described as “really the first poet I ever knew” (Frank O’Hara, Adrienne Rich, Robert Creeley, and Barbara Epstein were also classmates). After graduating in 1949, Ashbery attended Columbia as a Master’s student, and remained in New York City after completing his studies. Although closely associated with the poets and painters of fifties New York, in 1955 Ashbery won a Fulbright Scholarship and left New York for Paris, where he remained for the next 10 years (“Paris is ‘the city,’ isn’t it, and I am a lover of cities.”) There he began his career as an art critic, and although he achieved success and even published a book of criticism (1989’s Reported Sightings), Ashbery always viewed the work in practical terms, claiming in 1983 that he “was never interested in doing art criticism at all.” In Paris, Ashbery lived with the writer Pierre Martory, whose poetry he later translated into English, along with that of Rimbaud and Yves Bonnefoy, in Collected French Translations: Poetry (2014).

In 1965, Ashbery returned to New York, where he met his future husband David Kermani (to whom he dedicated both Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror and Flow Chart). Until 1972, he was executive editor at Art News. In the seventies, he began his teaching career, first at Brooklyn College, and, starting in 1990, at Bard College. Like art criticism, teaching too was a financial necessity. “Poets especially spend altogether too much time at other tasks such as teaching,” Ashbery once complained, although he admitted that “there are things to be said for it…[Students] may be writing great poetry, only nobody knows it because nobody has seen it yet.”

Ashbery died on September 3, 2017, in Hudson, New York. His last collection was Commotion of the Birds: New Poems, published the year before. Critic Harold Bloom, an early champion of Ashbery’s work, declared that he held a place in “the American sequence that includes Whitman, Dickinson, Stevens and Hart Crane.” “No one now writing poems in the English language,” Bloom declared, “is likelier than Ashbery to survive the severe judgment of time.”