John Lawrence Ashbery was born in Rochester, New York, on July 28th 1927. He went to school in Rochester in his home town Sodus, and at the age of sixteen was sent as a border to Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts. After graduating from there, in 1945, he entered Harvard Univesity, where he studied English. Ashbery obtained his BA in 1949, and went to Columbia University to study for his MA. He graduated from there in 1951, and found work in plubishing, becoming a copywriter, first for Oxford University Press and then for McGraw Hill Book Company. Poems of his continued to appear in magazines, amongst them Furioso, Poetry New York and Partisan Review, but as well as pursuing his literary interests, Ashbery was now mixing in New York's artistic circles, frequenting the galleries, and getting to know the painters. Then, in 1953, a chapbook of Ashbery's poems was published.

Three years later, by which time he was in Paris on a Fulbright fellowship, Ashbery's first full collection was chosen by W.H. Auden for inclusion in Yale University Press's Younger Poets Series. Reviewing Some Trees for Poetry, Frank O'Hara wrote of Ashbery's 'faultless music' and 'originality of perception', and pronounced it 'the most beautiful first book to appear in America since Harmonium'. Ashbery's period as a Fulbright fellow came to an end in 1957, but life in Paris had been so much to his liking that, after another year in the US - a year in which he took graduate classes at New York University and worked as an instructor in elementary French - he returned, avowedly to pursue research for a doctoral dissertation on the writer Raymond Roussel. He had started to review for the magazine ArtNews during his year in New York, and continued with this once back in Paris. Then, in 1960, he became art critic for the New York Herald Tribune (international edition), and, in 1961, art critic for Art International as well. In the same year that he started writing for the New York Herald Tribune, he joined with Kenneth Koch, Harry Mathews, and James Schuyler and founded the literary magazine, Locus Solus. That folded in 1962, but the following year he got together with Anne Dunn, Rodrigo Moynihan and Sonia Orwell, and founded Art and Literature, a quarterly review he worked on until he went back to living in the US, in 1966.

When not writing reviews, or engaged in editorial work, Ashbery still found time to write poetry. It was poetry of a very different kind to that he had published in Some Trees, however, and readers familiar with the first book will have been altogether unprepared for the 'violently experimental' character of the second.

Rivers and Mountains, published in the year that he settled back in the US, was the first of his books to follow, and marked what several of his critics regard as his real arrival as a poet, with poems such as These Lacustrine Cities, Clepsydra and The Skaters all demonstrating for the first time what one of them has called the 'astonishing range and flexibility of Ashbery's voice'. The volume was nominated for the National Book Award.

Ashbery had gone back to the US after being offered the job of executive editor of ArtNews. Four years later, in 1969, the Black Sparrow Press published his long poem Fragment, with illustrations by the painter Alex Katz.

ArtNews was sold in 1972, and Ashbery had to find himself another job. A Guggenheim Fellowship sustained him for some months, but then, in 1974, he took up the offer of a teaching post at Brooklyn College - a part of the City University of New York - where he co-directed the MFA program in creative writing. Though he has confessed to not liking teaching very much, he has been doing it ever since, though with one prolonged break between 1985 and 1990, made possible by the award of a MacArthur Foundation fellowship. He left Brooklyn College in 1990, was Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard between 1989 and 1990, and from then until now has been Charles P. Stevenson, Jr. Professor of Languages and Literature at Bard College at Annandale-on Hudson, New York.|

This large body of work has won Ashbery numerous admirers, amongst them some of today's most prominent critics. It has also won him numerous honours, awards and prizes.