Biography

Born on a farm near Whiteville, North Carolina, A. R. Ammons studied science at Wake Forest College and later studied English literature for three semesters at the University of California at Berkeley. He worked as a high-school principal in North Carolina and, upon completing his studies in California, spent twelve years in southern New Jersey as an executive in a firm that made biological glass. Ammons published his first book of poems when he was thirty. The idea of motion in nature figures prominently in his poetry, and Ammons explores the intricate contours of insect life as well as the movement of the winds and the changing light of day. His book-length poem Garbage, for which he won the National Book Award in 1993, shows his skill in moving between the specific and the general. Ammons's volumes of poetry include Ommateum (1955), Sphere: The Form of a Motion (1974), The Selected Longer Poems (1980), and Sumerian Vistas (1987).

Explorations

Building on a tradition centered on Whitman, Dickinson, Frost, Stevens,
H. D., and William Carlos Williams, and experimenting with both free verse and classic prosody, Ammons and Theodore Roethke are often singled out as representing a new kind of nature poet. There are Transcendental and romantic themes in the work of both of these artists, but we also see them looking at details, and at change, in a manner suggestive of the modern scientific mind. For both of these poets, spiritual consolations have to be reconciled with the facts as they present themselves, small often-surprising facts that most American nature poets before Dickinson and Frost would not have welcomed in verse.

1. Discuss Ammons's Easter Morning (1981) and Roethke's The Lost Son (1948) as elegies. What do elegies usually do? In terms of theme and mood, where do they usually arrive? Do these poems follow those rules? If so, to what extent and where? What do they draw upon to find their way out of the predicament of grief?

2. Compare Roethke's two short Cuttings poems (1948) to the opening forty-five lines of Ammons's Corson's Inlet (1965). How does each poem deal with the problem of observing, and writing about, a natural world that is always in transition?

3. Compare the final stanza of Roethke's In a Dark Time (1964) to the closing three stanzas of Ammons's The Dwelling (1987). These poems both seem to deal with Frost's problem of "What to make of a diminished thing," but do they arrive at the same answer? Describe the differences, and then speculate on how these differences resonate in other poems by each author.

Other sites to consult:

• A. R. Ammons page, a useful site maintained by a graduate student at the University of New Mexico. Includes a biography, bibliographic materials, and links to other Ammons resources.