John Ashbery obituary
One of the most influential American poets of his generation admired for his unorthodox use of language
Monday 4 September 2017 13.49 BST
John Ashbery, who has died aged 90, was widely considered the most innovative and influential American poet of his generation. The critic Harold Bloom, who played an important role in establishing Ashbery’s reputation in the mid-1970s, declared: “No one now writing poems in the English language is likelier than Ashbery to survive the severe judgments of time.” Yet Ashbery’s work also frequently aroused controversy; his early volume The Tennis Court Oath (1962) was dismissed by one critic as “garbage”; and even after his 1975 collection Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror won the Pulitzer prize for poetry, the National Book Critics Circle award and the National Book award, catapulting him to stardom, he was not without doubters and detractors.
