WRITER

John Ashbery

1927 - 2017

John Ashbery

John Lawrence Ashbery (July 28, 1927 – September 3, 2017) was an American poet and art critic.Ashbery is considered the most influential American poet of his time. Oxford University literary critic John Bayley wrote that Ashbery "sounded, in poetry, the standard tones of the age." Langdon Hammer, chair 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." Stephanie 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".Ashbery published more than 20 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, his work still proves controversial. Read more on Wikipedia

Since 2007, the English Wikipedia page of John Ashbery has received more than 514,319 page views. His biography is available in 33 different languages on Wikipedia. John Ashbery is the 3,647th most popular writer (down from 3,319th in 2019), the 4,675th most popular biography from United States (down from 4,351st in 2019) and the 388th most popular American Writer.

Memorability Metrics

510k
Page Views (PV)
51.20
Historical Popularity Index (HPI)
33
Languages Editions (L)
3.92
Effective Languages (L*)
3.96
Coefficient of Variation (CV)

Notable Works

Poems

American poetry

1972

Ellsworth Kelly

American Prints, Prints, American, Exhibitions

1968

Where Shall I Wander

Nonfiction

You meant more than life to me. I livedthrough you not knowing, not knowing Iwas living.I learned that you called for me. I came towhere you were living, up a stair. Therewas no one there.No one to appreciate me. The legality of itupset a chair. Many times to celebratewe were called together and wherewe had been there was nothing there,nothing that is anywhere. We passed obliquely,leaving no stare. When the sun was done muttering,in an optimistic way, it was time to leave that there.-- from "The New Higher"

2005

Self-portrait in a convex mirror

Poems, Poetry, Translation of: Self-portrait in a convex mirror

1975

As we know

Works by individual poets: from c 1900 -

1979

A Worldly Country

Fiction, Poetry

Thrill of a Romance It's different when you have hiccups. Everything is—so many glad hands competing for your attention, a scarf, a puff of soot, or just a blast of silence from a radio. What is it? That's for you to learn to your dismay when, at the end of a long queue in the cafeteria, tray in hand, they tell you the gate closed down after the Second World War. Syracuse was declared capital of a nation in malaise, but the directorate had other, hidden goals. To proclaim logic a casualty of truth was one. Everyone's solitude (and resulting promiscuity) perfumed the byways of villages we had thought civilized. I saw you waiting for a streetcar and pressed forward. Alas, you were only a child in armor. Now when ribald toasts sail round a table too fair laid out, why the consequences are only dust, disease and old age. Pleasant memories are just that. So I channel whatever into my contingency, a vein of mercury that keeps breaking out, higher up, more on time every time. Dirndls spotted with obsolete flowers, worn in the city again, promote open discussion.

2007

Page views of John Ashberies by language

Over the past year John Ashbery has had the most page views in the English wikipedia edition with 49,985 views, followed by Spanish (3,580), and Italian (2,868). In terms of yearly growth of page views the top 3 wikpedia editions are Southern Azerbaijani (70.20%), Macedonian (63.29%), and Swahili (45.54%)