John Ashbery

Guided by inscrutable ordering principles, John Ashbery's poetry expands in an organic, disciplined sprawl, unsullied by prolonged contact with the topical or trendy. If Ashbery's work can be said to actually be about anything, it has always been about the procession of its own existence, with the New York-based writer serving as a medium for a steady stream of unpredictable lines that are by turns polyvocal, surreal, blandly matter-of-fact and, quite often, disarmingly funny. There is no moral judgment exercised in his work, no grappling with grave issues, yet poem after poem—from villanelle to pantoum, from long-form to short—conveys a wealth of emotions while passing on a kind of accidental, avuncular wisdom. But his work remains profound nonetheless for the scope of its unchecked awareness and, perhaps more critically, for the freedoms it has extended to countless poets who have followed (however hopelessly) in his footsteps. For every fan, there's a critic who can't abide what might be seen as his embrace of meaninglessness, yet one would be hard-pressed to name anyone else who's had a broader influence on recent generations of poets than Ashbery. Take him or leave him, Ashbery has become the éminence grise of contemporary poetry, and after more than 20 volumes of work produced so far, he's showing no signs of slowing down.