Born in Paris, André du Bouchet lived in France until 1941 when his family left occupied Europe for the United States.
In 1956, he published a collection of poems entitled Le Moteur blanc or "The White Motor".
In 1966, he, along with (among others) Yves Bonnefoy, Jacques Dupin, Louis-René des Forêts and Gaëtan Picon, founded the poetry revue L'Ephémère.
He also wrote art criticism, most notably about the works of Nicolas Poussin, Hercules Seghers, Tal-Coat, Bram van Velde and Giacometti, and translated works by Paul Celan, Hölderlin, Osip Mandelstam, Boris Pasternak, Laura Riding, William Faulkner, Shakespeare and James Joyce.
André du Bouchet's poetry—greatly and conflictually influenced by the poetic and interpretive preoccupations of Stéphane Mallarmé, the "banality" of Pierre Reverdy's images, Arthur Rimbaud's "abrasive/coarse reality", the work of Henri Michaux, as well as the philosophical work of Heidegger—is characterized by a valuation of the page layout (with words erupting from the white of the page), by the use of free verse and, often, by difficult grammar and elusive meaning (he writes in "Notes on Translation" that sense "is not fixed").