John Ashbery, One of America’s Greatest Poets, Dead at 90

Ashbery’s 'Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror' won the Pulitzer Prize in 1976.

September 4, 2017 12:36 pm
resident Barack Obama presents 2011 National Arts and Humanities Medal to poet John Ashbery during a ceremony in the East Room at the White House in Washington, DC, on February 13, 2012. (JEWEL SAMAD/AFP/Getty Images)
resident Barack Obama presents 2011 National Arts and Humanities Medal to poet John Ashbery during a ceremony in the East Room at the White House in Washington, DC, on February 13, 2012. (JEWEL SAMAD/AFP/Getty Images)

John Ashbery,who died Sunday at his home in Hudson, N.Y., at age 90, was considered one of the greatest American poets of the 20th century.

Ashbery’s ‘Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror’ collection of poems, which was published in 1976, won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle prize.

Ashbery was a widely celebrated poem. He recieved a MacArthur Foundation grant in 1985, won the Antonio Feltrinelli International Prize for Poetry in 1992, and the French government made him a Chevalier de L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1993.  In 2012, Ashbery received the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama.

Famed literary critic Harold Bloom once wrote, according to the New York Times, that Ashberry will join “the American sequence that includes Whitman, Dickinson, Stevens and Hart Crane.”

Read more of Ashbery’s poems here.

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