List of awards and honors received by John Ashbery

American poet John Ashbery (1927–2017) received numerous awards, nominations, grants, fellowships, and other honors in his lifetime. He was generally regarded as the most-honored poet of his generation and one of the most-honored American writers of any era.; .

He received his first award, the 92nd Street Y Discovery Prize for unpublished poets, in 1952. Four years later, W. H. Auden selected him as the winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition, resulting in the publication of his debut poetry collection Some Trees. His 1975 collection Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror became the first book to win a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, and a National Book Critics Circle Award. To date, Ashbery remains the only writer to attain the achievement, which has been called the "Triple Crown" of American literature.; .

Beyond prizes and awards, Ashbery was a recipient of several monetary grants and fellowships that provided crucial support for his literary ambitions and travel. As a Fulbright scholar, he moved to France in 1955 to study French poetry and teach. He continued to live in the country for nearly a decade thereafter. Years later, the people of France conferred several honors in recognition of his lifelong engagement with French poetry and culture, most notably by making him an officer of the national Legion of Honor. In 1985 he received a MacArthur Fellowship—an unconditional cash prize informally known as the "Genius Grant"—allowing him to quit his job as a professor and write poetry full-time. He also received two Guggenheim Fellowships and two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. Poems by Ashbery were often anthologized among the year's best.

Ashbery had acquired a reputation as a prolific prize-winner by the early 1990s. According to James F. English's 2004 book The Economy of Prestige, Ashber had received more awards than any other poet in the world. English counted 45 awards for Ashbery, followed by Irish poet Seamus Heaney at 30 awards and fellow American poet Adrienne Rich at 25 awards. David Lehman observed that Ashbery also held a lead over the novelist John Updike, winner of 39 awards, and therefore Ashbery likely stood as the most-honored of any living American writer—at least in terms of sheer quantity of awards. Although he was considered a perennial contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature over the last three decades of his life—and almost certainly the leading candidate among American poets during that period—he never became a Nobel laureate.

Accolades for individual works 92Y Discovery Prize

The Discovery Prize is an award given to poets who have not yet published their debut book. It is given out annually by the 92nd Street Y (also called 92Y), a cultural and community center in Manhattan run by the Young Men's Hebrew Association (now called the Jewish Community Center).

Ashbery received the Discovery Prize on April 3, 1952, as the winner of what was then called the Poetry Center Introductions contest. He shared the award with Harvey Shapiro and Gray Burr. The contest that year had hundreds of competing applicants and was judged by John Malcolm Brinnin, Kimon Friar, and Richard Wilbur. It was Ashbery's first literary award.; . He gave a reading of sixteen poems at the award ceremony—his first since graduating college. When asked to judge the Discovery Prize competition in 2014, he replied, "I'll have to say yes, since the contest was the beginning of my poetry career, a mere 52 years ago."

ALA Notable Books Since 1944, the American Library Association (ALA) has compiled annual lists of Notable Books for adults. The winners are selected by the Notable Books Council, a subgroup within the ALA's Reference and User Services Association (RUSA), which also makes other award decisions. The criteria, as described in 2012, are:

Books written by Ashbery have been listed three times: once in 1978 for Houseboat Days, again in 1982 for Shadow Train, and a final time in 2012 for his translation of the French poet Arthur Rimbaud's Illuminations.

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"Best-of" anthologies In general, Ashbery was among the top 25 most frequently anthologized American poets of the latter half of the 20th century. In most cases, literary anthologies either attempt to define a set of "canonical" works or collect writings united by a common characteristic such as historical time period, region, author identity, genre, etc. Although inclusion in such anthologies can be considered prestigious, they are not understood to be "prizes" or "awards" per se. The following anthologies were competitive selections of the previous year's "best" poetry, as judged by an editor or panel of editors.

Year Poem Anthology Series Compiling editor or nominator 1970

1977

1988

1989

1990

1991

1992

1993

1994

1997

1998

Three poems: "Baked Alaska" "Myrtle" "The Problem of Anxiety"

Five poems from Some Trees(1956): "The Instruction Manual" "The Young Son" "Some Trees" "The Painter" "The Pied Piper"

Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition

2001

2002

2004

2005

2006

2008

2009

2010

2011

2013

2014

2017

2019 Three poems from Some Trees(1956): "A Boy" "Errors" "Answering a Question in the Mountains"

Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition

Borestone Mountain Poetry Awards

The Borestone Mountain Poetry Awards were a nonprofit literary foundation and annual poetry anthology series released between 1949 and 1977. The Borestone Mountain Poetry Awards anthologies collected the editors' selections of the best original English-language poems of no more than 100 lines published the preceding year in literary magazines. After making an initial selection, the editors read poems with the names of the author and original publication removed and assigned scores. The authors of the three highest-scoring poems received cash prizes and were designated as First, Second, and Third place in the anthology.

Ashbery's poem "Soonest Mended", first published in The Paris Review and included in his collection The Double Day of Spring(1970), was chosen for Best Poems of 1969: Borestone Mountain Poetry Awards 1970. It did not receive one of the top three placements.

Pushcart Prize Published annually since 1976, the Pushcart Prize anthologizes the best writing from independently published periodicals including poetry, fiction and nonfiction. Ashbery's poem "All Kinds of Caresses" appeared in The Pushcart Prize, II: Best of the Small Presses. It was nominated by the Chicago Review, the same journal in which it was first published. Ashbery was also a contributing editor for that volume and nominated Douglas Crase's "Cuylerville" and James Schuyler's "Song". Joan Murray and other Pushcart editors also selected the poem for The Pushcart Book of Poetry: The Best Poems From Three Decades of the Pushcart Prize(2006).

The Best American Poetry The Best American Poetry series launched in 1988 and is edited by David Lehman. Each year, a different guest editor selects 75 of the year's best American poetry published the preceding year. Ashbery was the guest editor for the first volume, The Best American Poetry 1988, in which he selected his own "One Coat of Paint". Between 1989 and 2017, poems of his were chosen 20 times. Three of those poems were included again in The Best of the Best American Poetry 1988–1997, which compiled Harold Bloom's selections from the 750 poems in the first ten years of the series. His poem "Wakefulness", originally chosen in the 1998 volume, was selected by Robert Pinsky for The Best of the Best American Poetry: 25th Anniversary Edition(2013).

Anthologies related to other awards Ashbery's debut collection Some Trees was chosen as the 52nd winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition and published by Yale University Press in 1956. Five poems from the book were subsequently included in The Yale Younger Poets Anthology, edited by George Bradley and published in 1998: "The Instruction Manual", "The Young Son", "Some Trees", "The Painter", and "The Pied Piper". Later, three poems from Some Trees—"A Boy", "Errors", and "Answering a Question in the Mountains"—were chosen for the series' 2019 centennial anthology Firsts: 100 Years of Yale Younger Poets, edited by Carl Phillips. See the section on the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize below.

Six of Ashbery's poems were included in The Griffin Poetry Prize 2008 Anthology because his book Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems was shortlisted for the international Griffin Poetry Prize. He ultimately won that year's international prize. See the section on the Griffin Prize below.

Bingham Poetry Prize The Bingham Poetry Prize was an award given by the literary magazine Boston Book Review. Established in 1993, the Boston Book Review published ten issues annually until it ceased publication in 2000 and, around 1997–98, reportedly had the third-highest circulation of any American book review periodical. Along with the magazine's Fisk Fiction Prize and Rea Non-Fiction Prize, the Bingham Poetry Prize was an annual award to "celebrate excellent literary accomplishments" that had been published the previous year. Each of the three awards carried a cash prize of $1,000.; see also

Ashbery was a co-winner of the Bingham Poetry Prize for The Mooring of Starting Out: The First Five Books of Poetry, a compilation of his early work.; . Judged by Jorie Graham, the 1998 prize was also awarded to Frank Bidart, who won for his collection Desire.

! |- ! scope="row" | 1998 | The Mooring of Starting Out: The First Five Books of Poetry | The Bingham Poetry Prize

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Griffin Poetry Prize

The Griffin Poetry Prize is an annual Canadian literary award established in 2000 by the Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry "to serve and encourage excellence in poetry written in or translated into English anywhere in the world." A cash prize is split between winners in two categories: one Canadian and one international author.

Ashbery won the 2008 Griffin Poetry Prize for Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems. The cash prize that year was , which exchanged for about at the time. A jury of George Bowering, James Lasdun, and Pura López Colomé selected the shortlist and judged the winner. The other shortlisted international titles, selected from a total of 509 submissions overall, were Ripple Effect: New and Selected Poems by Elaine Equi, The Complete Poetry: A Bilingual Edition by César Vallejo in a translation by Clayton Eshleman, and Selected Poems 1969–2005 by David Harsent.; .

Selections from the shortlisted books, including six poems from Notes from the Air, were anthologized in The Griffin Poetry Prize 2008 Anthology; see the section on anthologies above.

! |- ! scope="row" | 2008 | Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems | The Griffin Poetry Prize (International category)

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Longview Foundation Award

The Longview Foundation was an organization based in New York City; Harold Rosenberg was its program director. Longview Foundation Awards were selected by a panel of judges from a selection of poems published in independently published little magazines and collections. The award was accompanied by a $300 cash prize. The foundation first gave out awards in 1959 for poetry published in 1957 and 1958.

List of awards and honors received by John Ashbery

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