The Painter

“The Painter” is a sestina published by John Ashbery in his debut collection, Some Trees (1956). Considered a member of the New York School, Ashbery pushed the boundaries of representationalism in his long and successful avant-garde literary career. Despite the relative traditionalism of “The Painter” in terms of technique and style, the narrative of the poem expresses many of Ashbery’s key ideas about art, becoming a kind of theoretical guide for his later and more obscure work. As a poet, Ashbery stuck close to the artists and visual art of his day, drawing from abstract expressionism to find new ways of writing poetry. “The Painter” is exemplary of Ashbery’s preoccupation with painting and his understanding of the role of art and the artist in society.

Poet Biography

John Lawrence Ashbery was born in Rochester, New York in 1927 to a farmer father and a biology teacher mother. Spending his childhood at an all-boys school, Ashbery read and began writing poetry. Before he graduated high school, two of his poems were published in Poetry magazine after a classmate submitted them under his own name without Ashbery’s permission. As an adult, Ashbery earned his bachelor’s degree cum laude from Harvard University (then College), and his master of arts degree from Columbia University.