John Lawrence Ashbery was born in Rochester, New York, on July 28th 1927, the first son of Chester Frederick (a farmer) and Helen Ashbery (a biology teacher). He went to school in Rochester and in his home town of Sodus, and at the age of sixteen was sent as a boarder to Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts. After graduating from there, in 1945, he entered Harvard University, where he studied English. Ashbery had been writing poetry since his schooldays, and while at Deerfield had even had two of his poems published in the prestigious magazine, Poetry. Two years after he went to college he submitted work to the Harvard Advocate, the recently ...