John Ashbery

(–) was an award-winning American poet and a prominent art critic. Educated at Harvard and , he published 26 volumes of poetry spanning 60 years and won nearly every major American award for poetry, including a in 1976 and the and prizes in 1984 for the collections ' and A Wave, respectively. He was elected a Fellow of the in 1983, taught at as the Stevenson Professor of Languages and Literature from 1990 until his retirement in 2008, and remains the only writer to

10 quotes found

"There is the view that poetry should improve your life. I think people confuse it with the ."

- John Ashbery

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"Did I say that? One says so many things, and the problem is they all get written down."

- John Ashbery

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"It didn’t pay very much, but it enabled me to get other jobs doing art criticism, which I didn’t want to do very much, but as so often when you exhibit reluctance to do something, people think you must be very good at it. If I had set out to be an art critic, I might never have succeeded."

- John Ashbery

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"When I originally started writing, I expected that probably very few people would read my poetry because in those days people didn’t read poetry much anyway."

- John Ashbery

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"Well, there are certain stock words that I have found myself using a great deal. When I become aware of them, it is an alarm signal meaning I am falling back on something that has served in the past—it is a sign of not thinking at the present moment, not that there is anything intrinsically bad about certain words or phrases."

- John Ashbery

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"Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you, At incredible speed, traveling day and night, Through blizzards and desert heat, across torrents, through narrow passes. But will he know where to find you, Recognize you when he sees you, Give you the thing he has for you?"

- John Ashbery

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"In the beginning there are those who don't quite fit in But are somehow okay. And then some morning There are places that suddenly seem wonderful: Weather and water seem wonderful, And the peaceful night sky that arrives In time to protect us, like a sword Cutting the blue cloak of a prince."

- John Ashbery

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"These two guys in the front yard— Are they here to help?"

- John Ashbery

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"John Ashbery, incontrovertibly a great poet, remains both difficult and underread, even by his readers."

- John Ashbery

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"He had meticulous taste, if taste is a form of discernment, and discernment a kind of care and humility toward the world, its material stuff as well as its arbitrary weathers. He was drawn to the local and to the minor, the huge field of forgotten or overlooked or insignificant details of daily life, which he was able to transcribe, without relying on either mirrors or windows, but on the capaciousness of his restless, inquisitive, integrating imagination. He seemed to have an infinite resource of words and a flexible, if sometimes dissonant, syntax into which to put them. His poems are always in the service of making new relations, so that meanings arise without the insistent correlate of understanding but, instead, offer to his readers a new way to find sense in an apprehension or awareness of the variety of this world, and the capacity of language to provide ways of perceiving and, somehow, renovating it."