Arguably the most dominant figure in American poetry since Robert Lowell, whose 1975 book Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror swept all three major awards in poetry, the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award, John Ashbery died Sunday, September 3 of natural causes. He was ninety.

Ashbery was the author of twenty-eight individual collections of poetry, as well as numerous books of translations, essays, and art criticism. His book Some Trees was selected by W. H. Auden as the winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets in 1956. In 2011, Ashbery received the National Humanities Medal from President Obama. His work won the Lenore Marshall Prize, the Bollingen Prize, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, and many others, and was the first English-language poet to win the Grand Prix de Biennales Internationales de Poésie.

He was often considered a part of the New York School of Poets, along with writers like Kenneth Koch and Frank O’Hara, though that was not a label Ashbery embraced. He was a friend to many artists, who were a great influence on his work.

Writing for The New York Times, David Orr and Dinitia Smith said, “That poetry is by turns playful and elegiac, absurd and exquisite—but more than anything else, it is immediately recognizable. If some poets remind us of the richness of American poetry by blending seamlessly into one of its many traditions, Mr. Ashbery has frequently seemed like a tradition unto himself.”

The Associated Press’s obituary for Ashbery discussed his first poem: “He grew up on an apple farm in the nearby village of Sodus, where it snowed often enough to help inspire his first poem, The Battle, written at age 8 and a fantasy about a fight between bunnies and snowflakes. He would claim to be so satisfied with the poem and so intimidated by the praise of loved ones that he didn’t write another until boarding school, the Deerfield Academy, when his work was published in the school paper.”

Many tributes have appeared over the holiday weekend. LitHub republished its birthday piece for Ashbery from July, “90 Lines for John Ashbery’s Birthday.”

Dan Chiasson wrote a reminiscence of Ashbery for The New Yorker, saying, “The idea of greatness clung about him as it does to only a handful of writers alive at any time. His early work was serene and beautiful; he then became rather frantic and trippy. He had a period of majesty unrivalled in recent poetry. … His last phase was a kind of inventory of his mind, among the most interesting anyone has ever known.”

Writing for The San Francisco Chronicle, Matthew Zapruder said, “Some will tell you his poems are difficult, elusive, even meaningless. This is not true. They are difficult because they are doing something with language that is unfamiliar. The poems search for meaning, and even a kind of truth, in a way that we are unused to. I remember at first it took me some time to let go of some things I believed about poetry, so I could begin to experience his poems. What is most difficult about Ashbery’s poetry is not understanding, but accepting it.”

His poem “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” can be read at the Poetry Foundation website.

Photo Credit: Lynn Davis