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date: 10 February 2025

Ammons, A. R.locked

Ammons, A. R.locked

  • Aaron K. DiFranco

Extract

One of the most prolific poets of the late twentieth century, A. R. Ammons generated a poetic style versatile enough to handle hard, controlled lyrics as well as more expansive, contemplative meditations in his long poems. Although most often placed in an American tradition from Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and Ralph Waldo Emerson through Wallace Stevens, his innovative voice perhaps best supports his proposition that he had been influenced by “everyone.” In one of his few poetic statements, A Poem Is a Walk, he indicates a debt to Samuel Coleridge's “secondary imagination,” Lao-tzu's Taoist configurations, as well as his own frequent walks, each of which served as a model for encountering the contradictions of the world's shifting details. Often associated with the poet John Ashbery for the way his reflexive verse presents the motions of mind, Ammons's attention to the details of nature encountered on his excursions also invites comparison to poets Robert Frost and Gary Snyder. Restless and circumspect, believing more in process than pattern, Ammons produced more than twenty volumes of poetry over his celebrated career.

Subjects

  • North American Literatures

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