"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."
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, Schwab Professor of Languages and Literature & Milton Avery School of the Arts Co-Chair, Bard College (Faculty Remembrances)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Ashbery
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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
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