Some Trees

John Ashbery’s first published book of poems, handpicked from the slush pile by none other than W. H. Auden Ashbery’s Some Trees narrowly beat out a manuscript by fellow New York poet Frank O’Hara to win the renowned Yale Series of Younger Poets prize in 1955—after the book had been rejected in an early screening round. Competition judge W. H. Auden was perhaps the first to note, in his original preface to Some Trees , the meditative polyphony that decades of readers have come to identify as Ash