Until he went off to college, John Ashbery, who would become the leading American poet of his generation, saw himself more as a painter than as a poet. He began art lessons at 11, four years ...

John Ashbery was the poet who observed that “it’s different when you have hiccups.” He was right about this—right about many things, even if his fabled “difficulty” sometimes obscured ...

John Ashbery wrote his first poem when he was 8. It rhymed and made sense (“The tall haystacks are great sugar mounds/ These are the fairies’ camping grounds”) and the young writer—who had ...

“I have a natural horror of letting people see how my mind works,” a 23-year-old John Ashbery wrote to the painter Jane Freilicher in 1950. It’s not a surprising sentiment. Ashbery, who will ...

When John Ashbery died last year, so many eulogists lined up to proclaim him the greatest American poet since whenever that it was easy to forget just how much fun he could be. He was a poet who ...

John Ashbery, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet known for his surrealist, confounding works, has died at age 90. The poet died of natural causes in his Hudson, N.Y., home early Sunday, confirms Farrar ...

Ashbery in 1996. (Ulf Andersen/Getty Images) When he was 8 years old, John Ashbery stopped writing poetry. He’d just finished a poem about the battle of the snowflakes and the bunnies. It rhymed ...

John Ashbery, widely considered one of the greatest American poets of the last century, died in his home in Hudson, New York, on Sunday, just weeks after his ninetieth birthday. Born in Rochester ...

John Ashbery died on Sunday at the age of 90. While his death of a nonagenarian can hardly be described as a shock, there is still something unsettling, for his admirers, about losing someone who ...

John Ashbery is the author of more than 30 volumes of poetry, criticism and essays, including most recently, “A Worldly Country” and “Selected Later Poems.” He has won nearly every major ...