Ashbery published some work in the Advocate, one in a plethora of aspiring young writers whose names would later ring with household familiarity. The presence on campus of fellow undergraduates and now much-acclaimed poets Frank O'Hara and Kenneth Koch put Harvard at the "center of cultural poetic activity" in the late 1940's, Shoptaw says.

It was Koch and O'Hara who later urged Ashbery to move to New York City, the poets' mecca, where he currently resides.

Since graduating from the College, Ashbery has published 19 books of verse in addition to numerous individual poems.

Porter University Professor Helen H. Vendler describes Ashbery's work as "unrolling in long, beautiful loops of language, often as access to a luminated mind stocked with solemnity and absurdity alike, and incorporating the best of the experimental with the best of the traditional."

Despite his less-than-stellar senior thesis and rejection from the GSAS, Ashbery returned to Cambridge in 1989 as Norton Professor of Poetry, a position he retained for a year. The Norton professorship is one of the country's most prominent guest lectureships: Ashbery was following in the footsteps of such literary luminaries as Harold Bloom, Jorge Luis Borges, Umberto Eco, Robert Frost and Thornton Wilder, as well as fellow graduates like Eliot and cummings.

In 1990, Ashbery left Harvard to take on a post as a professor of languages and literature at Bard College, where he still teaches.

Wallace Stevens, who attended Harvard at the turn of the century, was also an important influence on Ashbery and Ashbery's writing, Shoptaw says.

Other writers instrumental in Ashbery's development as a poet were Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore. In the 1960s Ashbery called Moore, who also published in the Advocate, "the greatest living poet."

At that time, Shoptaw points out, Ezra Pound was still alive and writing, and Ashbery's comment reflects his rejection of what Shoptaw calls "the Pound tradition, the other poetic tradition of high modernism."

Shoptaw says Ashbery disliked that extremely modern "poetry with footnotes" or writing "that you had to bone up for."

In fact, Ashbery, whose writing career began post-World War II, was part of a trend towards non-representational art and music at the time, Shoptaw says. His poetry was unique in writing circles, however; contemporary poetry was largely "mired in describing ordinary experience, and especially ordinary suburban experience," Shoptaw says.

Shoptaw says Ashbery's signature writing style, a voice simultaneously private and accessible, has influenced much modern poetry.

"I think one of his chief contributions is writing poetry which is personal but not particular to his own life," he says. "Ashbery has a funny way of fusing particulars which might be anybody's life."

Ashbery's latest collection, Girls on the Run: A Poem (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999), epitomizes what Shoptaw calls "a move from the mature to premature."

"Ashbery's poetry now is getting younger and younger, wilder and wilder," he says. "It's positively adolescent."