1. Quotes
  2. Authors
  3. John Ashbery

John Ashbery Quotes

John Lawrence Ashbery was an American poet. He published more than twenty volumes of poetry and won nearly every major American award for poetry, including a Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for his collection Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. Renowned for its postmodern complexity and opacity, Ashbery's work still proves controversial. Ashbery stated that he wished his work to be accessible to as many people as possible, and not to be a private dialogue with himself. At the same time, he once joked that some critics still view him as "a harebrained, homegrown surrealist whose poetry defies even the rules and logic of Surrealism."

Langdon Hammer, chairman of the English Department at Yale University, wrote in 2008, "No figure looms so large in American poetry over the past 50 years as John Ashbery" and "No American poet has had a larger, more diverse vocabulary, not Whitman, not Pound." Stephen Burt, a poet and Harvard professor of English, has compared Ashbery to T. S. Eliot, calling Ashbery "the last figure whom half the English-language poets alive thought a great model, and the other half thought incomprehensible".



✵ 28. July 1927 – 3. September 2017
John Ashbery photo

Works

Self-portrait in a Convex Mirror
John Ashbery: 14 quotes2 likes

Famous John Ashbery Quotes

“until only infinity remained of beauty”

John Ashbery

Source: Some Trees

“How many people came and stayed a certain time,
Uttered light or dark speech that became part of you
Like light behind windblown fog and sand
Filtered and influenced by it, until no part
Remains that is surely you.”

John Ashbery

“The summer demands and takes away too much. /But night, the reserved, the reticent, gives more than it takes”

John Ashbery book Self-portrait in a Convex Mirror

Source: Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror

“Most reckless things are beautiful in some way, and recklessness is what makes experimental art beautiful, just as religions are beautiful because of the strong possibilities that they are founded on nothing.”

John Ashbery

John Ashbery Quotes about people

“When I originally started writing, I expected that probably very few people would read my poetry because in those days people didn’t read poetry much anyway.”

John Ashbery

Source: Paris Review Interview (1983)

“It didn’t pay very much, but it enabled me to get other jobs doing art criticism, which I didn’t want to do very much, but as so often when you exhibit reluctance to do something, people think you must be very good at it. If I had set out to be an art critic, I might never have succeeded.”

John Ashbery

Source: The Paris Review (Issue 90, Winter 1983)

“There is the view that poetry should improve your life. I think people confuse it with the Salvation Army.”

John Ashbery

International Herald Tribune (Paris, October 2, 1989) The Columbia World of Quotations, 1996. http://www.bartleby.com/66/78/4378.html

John Ashbery Quotes

“Did I say that? One says so many things, and the problem is they all get written down.”

John Ashbery

In response to the question "Why do you call yourself anti-art?," Bard College, 2005

“These two guys in the front yard--
Are they here to help?”

John Ashbery

"Gorboduc"
April Galleons (1987)

“In the beginning there are those who don't quite fit in
But are somehow okay. And then some morning
There are places that suddenly seem wonderful:
Weather and water seem wonderful,
And the peaceful night sky that arrives
In time to protect us, like a sword
Cutting the blue cloak of a prince.”

John Ashbery

"A Snowball in Hell"
Source: April Galleons (1987)

“Well, there are certain stock words that I have found myself using a great deal. When I become aware of them, it is an alarm signal meaning I am falling back on something that has served in the past—it is a sign of not thinking at the present moment, not that there is anything intrinsically bad about certain words or phrases.”

John Ashbery

Source: Paris Review Interview (1983)

“Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you,
At incredible speed, traveling day and night,
Through blizzards and desert heat, across torrents, through narrow passes.
But will he know where to find you,
Recognize you when he sees you,
Give you the thing he has for you?”

John Ashbery

A Wave (1984) <br class="br">Source: &quot;At North Farm&quot; ( Electronic Poetry Center: At North Farm https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/authors/ashbery/north.html)

Similar authors

Franklin D. Roosevelt photo
Franklin D. Roosevelt190
32nd President of the United States None
John F. Kennedy photo
John F. Kennedy469
35th president of the United States of America None
Joseph Brodsky photo
Joseph Brodsky17
Russian and American poet and Nobel Prize for Literature la… None
Arthur Miller photo
Arthur Miller147
playwright from the United States None
George S. Patton photo
George S. Patton77
United States Army general None
Donald J. Trump photo
Donald J. Trump904
45th President of the United States of America None
Eleanor Roosevelt photo
Eleanor Roosevelt148
American politician, diplomat, and activist, and First Lady… None
Seamus Heaney photo
Seamus Heaney29
Irish poet, playwright, translator, lecturer None
Ben Carson photo
Ben Carson191
17th and current United States Secretary of Housing and Urb… None
Dwight D. Eisenhower photo
Dwight D. Eisenhower173
American general and politician, 34th president of the Unit… None