Existing comment:
John Ashbery (Argyle Socks):
John Ashbery (born 1927) is shown here at the beginning of what would become one of the most distinguished careers in American poetry. A prodigy in prep school and at Harvard, he was working as a copyeditor in New York City in the early 1960s when he met and became friends with the artists and writers who would become known as the "New York School." Ashbery would publish more than twenty books of poetry and innumerable other writings, including fiction and art criticism, well into his eighties. In 1973 he won the Pulitzer Prize as well as the other major awards for American poetry.
The artist Fairfield Porter was roughly twenty years older than John Ashbery and the other New York School poets of the 1950s. Porter found the younger generation sympathetic personally and inclined to his view that there needed to be a quieter, more introspective aesthetic like this depiction of the poet thinking.
Fairfield Porter, 1952 |