About A. R. Ammons
A. R. Ammons (February 18, 1926 – February 25, 2001) was an American poet. He began writing during World War II, aboard a US Navy destroyer on a mission in the South Pacific. After the war, he attended Wake Forest University, where he majored in biology, and then received his Master of Arts in English from the University of California, Berkeley. Ammons published his first collection of poems, “Ommateum: with doxology”, in 1955. He went on to write about thirty more, which garnered numerous literary awards: his Collected Poems 1951–1971, published in 1972, won the National Book Award, and his book “Sphere” (1974) won the Bollingen Prize. He also received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry for his collection “A Coast of Trees” (1981) and won both the National Book Award and the Library of Congress's Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry for his book “Garbage” (1993). Ammons also received the Academy's Wallace Stevens Award, the Poetry Society of America's Robert Frost Medal, and the Ruth Lilly Prize. He wrote about humanity's relationship to nature in alternately comic and solemn tones. Ammons often writes in two- or three-line stanzas. According to Daniel Hoffman, who wrote a book review on Ammons, stated that his work “is founded on an implied Emersonian division of experience into Nature and the Soul,” adding that it “sometimes consciously echo[es] familiar lines from Emerson, Whitman and [Emily] Dickinson”.Browse all poems and texts published on A. R. Ammons
Poetry leads us to the unstructured sources of our beings, to the unknown, and returns us to our rational, structured selves refreshed. Having once experienced the mystery, plenitude, contradiction, and composure of a work of art, we afterward have a built-in resistance to the slogans and propaganda of oversimplification that have often contributed to the destruction of human life. Poetry is a verbal means to a nonverbal source. It is a motion to no-motion, to the still point of contemplation and deep realization.
