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.

[11] 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.

[15] 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.

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.

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".

[28] 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.

[59] However, he did receive a Longview Foundation Award for two poems, "How Much Longer Will I Be Able to Inhabit the Divine Sepulcher ..." and "April Fool's Day", both of which had been published in Big Table Volume 1, Number 3 (1959).

[113] Three years later, the same three judges awarded Ashbery the Union League Civic and Arts Foundation Poetry Prize of $100 for the poem "Fragment", published in February 1966.

[125] In the jury's report to the Pulitzer Advisory Board, Hecht wrote: In his seventh book of poems, ... Ashbery has responded to those impulses of recuperation, of recurrence and reversion which poetry incarnates, observing its beginning and endings by a prosody of intermittence and collage rather than by any such conventional markings as rhyme or refrain.

Ein weltgewandtes Land, a bilingual edition of the collection A Worldly Country with translations by multiple German poets, ranked in first place on the December 2010 list with 69 points.

Flussbild, a bilingual edition of Flow Chart with a German translation by Matthias Göritz [de] and Uda Strätling, ranked tenth in May 2013 with 29 points.

Alongside Ashbery, some of the highly regarded winners selected by Auden include James Wright, Adrienne Rich, W. S. Merwin, and John Hollander.

He relied on this formal separation from the foundation to preserve normal social relations with other artists; he did not want to appear to be granting favors to friends, or to put others in the awkward position of personally asking him for funding.

[176] Vance Bourjaily, Robert Duncan, Albert Guerard, Mark Harris, Philip Roth, Anne Sexton, Roger Shattuck, John Simon, and Louis Simpson.

[203] Each year, the Heritage Award recognizes "a Deerfield alumnus or alumna whose professional and personal achievements represent a special contribution to the betterment of society."

Other noteworthy recipients have included diplomat Rick Barton, meteorologist Kerry Emanuel, physician Caldwell Esselstyn, architect Hugh Hardy, writer and television producer Budd Schulberg, and executive Alan Hassenfeld.

"[227] Contemporaneous sources reporting on the Bollingen announcement, such as The New York Times and Poetry magazine, also described it as a cumulative award recognizing his work published to date and did not mention A Wave.

[233] The MLA jury that selected Ashbery included Walter Scott Achtert, Phyllis Franklin, Winfred P. Lehmann, J. Hillis Miller, and Barbara Herrnstein Smith.

[193] He received the Silver Medal of the City of Paris in 1996, coinciding with the publication of Quelqu'un que vous avez déjà vu (Someone You Have Seen Before), a translation of his selected poetry into French by Anne Talvaz [fr] and Pierre Martory.

[238] The Horst Bienek Prize for Poetry (Horst-Bienek-Preis für Lyrik) is an international literary award of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts (Bayerische Akademie der Schönen Künste) in Munich, Germany.

[243] He received the prize at the 62nd National Book Awards Ceremony and Benefit Dinner on November 16, 2011, at the high-end venue Cipriani Wall Street in the Financial District of Manhattan.

Writing about the event for the Poetry Society of America, Darrel Alejandro Holnes remarked that Ashbery appeared "cordial and visibly joyful" as he received his medal.

[256] Other recipients of the award that year were Merce Cunningham, Brendan Gill, Alberta Hunter, David Katz, LuEsther Mertz, Tina Ramirez, Vivian Robinson, Arthur Ross, Rudolf Serkin, Maureen Stapleton, and Sol Steinberg.

Ashbery and Paula Fox were the two living writers to join the Hall of Fame that year; the others were Willa Cather, Julia de Burgos, Ralph Ellison, Lorraine Hansberry, Madeleine L'Engle, Herman Melville, and Dorothy Parker.

[264] The prize also recognized the recent publication of Un mondo che non può essere migliore: Poesie scelte 1956–2007, an Italian-language collection of selected poems translated by Moira Egan, Damiano Abeni, and Joseph Harrison.

As part of the Premio Napoli events in October, Ashbery called in from New York for a conversation with Moresco, presented for a live audience at the Royal Palace of Naples and broadcast on the radio by RAI.

They were the first winners of the foundation's Helen Creeley Student Poetry Prize, a contest open to submissions from area high schoolers and named for Robert's sister, who was also a poet.

[note 7] Ashbery was the subject of public Nobel speculation as early as 1995, when Swedish publisher Svante Weyler [sv] dropped his name to the Associated Press as a candidate under discussion.

[327] Ladbrokes' odds are regularly cited in the press, as Noble recipients are notoriously difficult to predict given the wide field of potential candidates, who are often obscure to the general public.

[310] The same year, the Swedish scholar Kerstin Lundberg Hahn commented that it had been a long time since a Nobel had gone to a poet—the last had been Heaney in 1995—and he named Ashbery, Adunis (a Syrian), and Les Murray (an Australian) as probable winners for poetry.