"At North Farm" is a poem by American poet and writer John Ashbery.
The poem first appeared in The New Yorker in 1984. [1] It was the opening poem of Ashbery's 1984 collection A Wave. [2] It was written soon after Ashbery almost died due to an infection. [3]
The poem is in part a reference to the epic poem Kalevala , which Ashbery revisited in his later poem "Finnish Rhapsody". [4]
The poem loosely adheres to the form of a sonnet, with the traditional fourteen lines and the octet/seste of a Petrarchan sonnet. [5] Adhering to the format was not intentional on Ashbery's part. [5]
In her review of A Wave, Helen Vendler wrote that the poem deals with the pains of aging using clichés. [6]
The poem is evocative of W. H. Auden's work. [7] Auden had an influence on Ashbery early poetry, an influence that diminished over the course of his career.
Although shorter and simpler than many of his most famous works, it is considered to be a well-known poem of Ashbery's. [4]
Wystan Hugh Auden was an Anglo-American poet. Auden's poetry was noted for its stylistic and technical achievement, its engagement with politics, morals, love, and religion, and its variety in tone, form, and content. Some of his best known poems are about love, such as "Funeral Blues"; on political and social themes, such as "September 1, 1939" and "The Shield of Achilles"; on cultural and psychological themes, such as The Age of Anxiety; and on religious themes such as "For the Time Being" and "Horae Canonicae".
John Lawrence Ashbery was an American poet and art critic.
Robert Traill Spence Lowell IV was an American poet. He was born into a Boston Brahmin family that could trace its origins back to the Mayflower. His family, past and present, were important subjects in his poetry. Growing up in Boston also informed his poems, which were frequently set in Boston and the New England region. The literary scholar Paula Hayes believes that Lowell mythologized New England, particularly in his early work.
James Marcus Schuyler was an American poet. His awards include the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his 1980 collection The Morning of the Poem. He was a central figure in the New York School and is often associated with fellow New York School poets John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, Kenneth Koch, and Barbara Guest.
Helen Hennessy Vendler is an American literary critic and is Porter University Professor Emerita at Harvard University.
Sonnet 1 is one of 154 sonnets written by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare. It is a procreation sonnet within the Fair Youth sequence.
William Shakespeare's Sonnet 130 mocks the conventions of the showy and flowery courtly sonnets in its realistic portrayal of his mistress.
Sonnet 60 is one of 154 sonnets written by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare. It's a member of the Fair Youth sequence, in which the poet expresses his love towards a young beloved.
Sonnet 12 is one of 154 sonnets written by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare. It is a procreation sonnet within the Fair Youth sequence.
Sonnet 15 is one of 154 sonnets written by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare. It forms a diptych with Sonnet 16, as Sonnet 16 starts with "But...", and is thus fully part of the procreation sonnets, even though it does not contain an encouragement to procreate. The sonnet is within the Fair Youth sequence.
Sonnet 23 is one of a sequence of 154 sonnets written by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare, and is a part of the Fair Youth sequence.
Sonnet 26 is one of 154 sonnets written by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare, and is a part of the Fair Youth sequence.
Sonnet 64 is one of 154 sonnets written by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare. It is a member of the Fair Youth sequence, in which the poet expresses his love towards a young man.
Station Island is the sixth collection of original poetry written by the Northern Irish poet Seamus Heaney, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995. It is dedicated to the Northern Irish playwright Brian Friel. The collection was first published in the UK and Ireland in 1984 by Faber & Faber and was then published in America by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1985. Seamus Heaney has been recorded reading this collection on the Seamus Heaney Collected Poems album.
Sonnet 71 is one of 154 sonnets written by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare. It's a member of the Fair Youth sequence, in which the poet expresses his love towards a young man. It focuses on the speaker's aging and impending death in relation to his young lover.
Sonnet 127 of Shakespeare's sonnets (1609) is the first of the Dark Lady sequence, called so because the poems make it clear that the speaker's mistress has black hair and eyes and dark skin. In this poem the speaker finds himself attracted to a woman who is not beautiful in the conventional sense, and explains it by declaring that because of cosmetics one can no longer discern between true and false beauties, so that the true beauties have been denigrated and out of favour.
Stephanie Burt is a literary critic and poet who is Professor of English at Harvard University and a transgender activist. The New York Times has called her "one of the most influential poetry critics of [her] generation". Burt grew up around Washington, D.C. She has published four collections of poetry and a large amount of literary criticism and research. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The London Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, The Believer, and The Boston Review.
Joan Vincent Murray was a Canadian American poet.
Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror is a 1975 poetry collection by the American writer John Ashbery. The title, shared with its final poem, comes from the painting of the same name by the Late Renaissance artist Parmigianino. The book won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award, the only book to have received all three awards.