Ashbery was born in 1929 near Rochester, New York. He is author of more than fifteen books of poems, beginning with Turandot and Other Poems in 1953, and is considered one of the leading contemporary American poets. His works range in length from two-line poems and haiku to the book-length Flow Chart.

Sponsor Message.

Ashbery is a disconcerting poet to read. He produces poems that look like poems, yet do not live up to our expectations of poems and how they create meaning. His poems follow the action of his mind and so always are in danger of being solipsistic, yet they are also clearly engaged in a discourse with the reader.

Ashbery is often referred to as a philosophical poet. He is clearly concerned with the nature of language and its connection to thought. He is also concerned more specifically with the nature of poetry and its boundaries in the second half of the twentieth century, as well as with the relationship between poet and reader.

Although Ashbery's poems often have the feel of autobiography, he does not include his own life in his poetry in a recognizable way. His claim to being a gay poet depends more on his friendship with Frank O'Hara and his inclusion in O'Hara's poems than it does on anything in his own writing. For example, Ashbery appears as a character in O'Hara's "At the Old Place," under the names "Ashes," "J.A.," and "John." In a memorable section of this poem celebrating a seedy gay bar, O'Hara dances with Ashbery: "Wrapped in Ashes' arms I glide. / (It's heaven!)."

The critic and poet Richard Howard makes a distinction between "homosexual writers" and "writers who are homosexual." Although most Ashbery criticism places him in the latter category, ignoring questions of sexual preference either in his life or the poems, there have been a few attempts to read Ashbery as a gay poet.

One approach is to try to assign a specific biographical meaning to Ashbery's fluid self(?)-descriptions. Helen Vendler has identified a passage in Flow Chart as referring to Ashbery's adolescent difficulties with being gay, but this reading, like all readings of Ashbery, can be only probably, not certainly, true.

Another approach is to use psychoanalytic tools to discover the meaning beneath the surface of the text. For example, David Bergman, in a Freudian reading of Ashbery, has seen "egolessness" as a sign of homosexual writing in general, and of Ashbery's in particular.

Since Ashbery intends to frustrate all labeling projects, in making our estimate of him as a gay poet we come up against our own understanding of what we expect from a gay poet. Despite the lack of explicit gay content, for example, his work shares concerns with other late twentieth-century gay writing. Ashbery probes the nature of identity, how a person constructs his own identity and that of others, and the degree to which that identity depends on the culture around us. He also adopts an attitude similar to camp. His ironic mocking of the culture he lives in betrays his passion for that culture.

After Stonewall, gay male literature became focused as a movement, aided by the development of gay newspapers, magazines, and quarterlies and the founding of serious gay and lesbian bookstores.

Combining elements of incongruity, theatricality, and exaggeration, camp is a form of humor that helps homosexuals cope with a hostile environment.

The gay tradition in literature from ancient times to the present is primarily a tradition not of prose but of verse.

Richard Howard's searching and witty poetry, in which homosexuality is not a problem but a solution, is a significant contribution to the gay and lesbian literary heritage.

The influential poet Frank O'Hara wrote works informed by both modern art and the world of urban gay male culture.

Although little is reliably known of the private life of sixteenth-century Italian Renaissance painter Parmigianino, his superbly refined and tortuously complex style has often appealed to a gay male audience sensitive to the extremes of taste embodied by Mannerism.

Bisexual artist Fairfield Porter is recognized as a major twentieth-century American Intimist painter.

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet James Schuyler, a prominent member of the New York School of poets and painters, wrote openly about his homosexuality.