Archie Randolph Ammons is a Southerner, born on his family's farm near Whiteville, North Carolina. His Protestant, rural childhood has apparently contributed both to his unwillingness to settle for ea...
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A.R. Ammons is the foremost living representative of the American Romantic tradition in poetry. In an era when most contemporary poets have abandoned the broad concerns of Romanticism in favor of more...
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Lieberman is an American poet and critic whose verse combines the particular and the visionary in its celebration of the physical world. The long, flowing lines and eloquent language of his poems set ...
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Vendler is regarded by many as one of America's foremost critics of poetry. Since the mid-1960s she has contributed reviews and articles on poetry to prominent literary publications, in particu...
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In the following essay, Fink explores the tensions between the concepts of individuality and unity as presented in Ammons's poetry, claiming that this polarity gives rise to a political dimensi...
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Allen is an American educator, poet, and critic. In the following essay, he asserts that Ammons's poetry constantly challenges the traditional conception of poetry, as well as the standard role...
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Cushman is an American educator and critic. In the following essay, he attempts to define the structural principle of Ammons's verse, focusing on such features as stanza shape and length, typog...
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In the following interview, which was conducted in March 1988, Ammons speaks about his literary career and his poetry.
[Walsh]: I read an interview the other day where the guest was asked if there was...
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In the following essay, Lepkowski perceives religious sentiment and motifs in Ammons's poetry.
Critical attention to the religious element in the poetry of A. R. Ammons has generally subsumed i...
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An acclaimed American novelist, short story writer, and poet, Harrison is best known for his fiction but has published nine collections of verse. In the following review, he perceives some flaws in Ta...
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Logan is an American poet and critic whose verse is generally regarded as intense and personal as well as distinctly humanist in its central concern with humankind and its potential. He has served as ...
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In the following essay, which was first presented as a lecture in 1967, Ammons considers the difficulty of defining poetry. He concludes by offering two observations: "poetry is a mode of disco...
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Bloom is one of the most prominent contemporary American critics and literary theorists. In The Anxiety of Influence (1973), he formulated a controversial theory of literary creation called revisionis...
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In the following excerpt, Ammons discusses his ideas about poetry.
[Grossvogel]: You seem to be suspicious of mentalisms. In your poem "Uh, Philosophy," isn't that "uh�...
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An American educator and critic, Waggoner was known for his expertise in the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne. His writings also include American Poets from the Puritans to the Present (1968) and American...
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Bullis is an American poet and critic. In the following review of The Snow Poems, he finds that Ammons is one of the few poets to successfully undertake the challenge of the non-narrative long poem. B...
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Reid was an American educator and critic. In the following essay, he traces Ammons's emergence as a major post-modern writer who has rejected modernist sensibilities and seeks humankind'...
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In the following review, Berry discusses Ammons's focus on knowledge in his Expressions of Sea Level, and analyzes the poet's use of form and scientific language.
In this admirable book,...
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In the following essay, Jarraway discusses Ammons's "Essay on Poetics" in relation to American literature.
In the context of American literature, the presentiment of the writer-as...
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In the following review, Ponce discusses Garbage, stating that "As in his earlier poems, he uses an object as a springboard into thoughts of a universal significance."
Writers usually pr...
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In the following excerpt, Hirsch praises Ammons's Garbage.
Archie Randolph Ammons's book-length poem, Garbage, the winner of this year's National Book Award, has a rueful grandeur...
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In the following excerpt, Shaw offers a mixed review of Garbage.
We have landfill to thank for A. R. Ammons's latest book-length poem. The sight of a huge mound of refuse beside I-95 in Florida...
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In the following essay, Lepowski analyzes the religious element in Ammons's poetry and the poet's changing portrayal of God.
Critical attention to the religious element in the poetry of ...
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In the following excerpt, Sail discusses the virtues and flaws of Ammons's Tape for the Turn of the Year and Garbage.
… Should a poem be, formally or thematically, open or closed? What i...
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In the following excerpt, Sansom discusses Ammons's critical reception in England.
In a power-rhyming slap-happy parody of Thirties doom-mongering published in 1938 William Empson famously had ...
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In the following essay, Jacobsen discusses the major sources of tension in Ammons's poetry, including limitation, utility and waste, and compensation, as well as the features which make Ammons&...
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In the following review, Bullis discusses the form and themes of Ammons's The Snow Poems.
The Snow Poems are actually one poem. It is a diary of the 1975–76 year: a record of Ammons�...
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In the following essay, Fosso analyzes the ontological and cosmological concerns in Ammons's poetry.
His poems witness that A. R. Ammons knows what he is about and we who relish reading him are...
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In the following essay, Quinn discusses the place of the physical world and the figure of Ezra in Ammons's poetry.
Beginning his 1968 Selected Poems "in the middle of the thing," ...
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In the following interview, conducted March 6, 1988 in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Ammons discusses his life, work, and view of poetry.
When A. R. Ammons's Collected Poems 1951–1971 a...
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In the following essay, Dilworth interprets Ammons's "Coon Song."
"Coon Song" by A. R. Ammons is a remarkably metamorphic literary experience. It seems to deconstruc...
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In the following essay, Wolfe asserts that from "Essay on Poetics" on, "Ammons emphasizes the becoming, rather than the Being, of nature—the processes rather than the fixit...
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In the following essay, McGeachy Mills asserts that "In its every complexity" Ammons's 'Singing & Doubling Together,' "signals the mysterious, paradoxical...
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Critical Essay by Peter Stitt
When A. R. Ammons goes wrong, I think the problem is primarily one of voice. At his best, he is an objective poet who speculates on the nature of reality and its possible...
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Critical Essay by Robert Mcdowell
After he has published a "major" collection, a poet can be excused for some time. A few may groan a little, but nobody will long lament if he never appr...
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Critical Essay by Stephen Yenser
Although they shade off into one another, there are basically three kinds of poem in [A. R. Ammons's The Selected Poems: 1951–1977], and they all have to...
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Critical Essay by David Kirby
Ammons is hard to read, not because he is hard to understand, but because his vatic poems make the reader want to get everything from them. Ammons's usual persona ...
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Critical Essay by Vernon Shetley
A. R. Ammons means to be a meditative poet, but he keeps getting distracted. He would, like Wallace Stevens, write the poems of the mind in the act of finding, but wha...
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Critical Essay by Robert Phillips
Ammons' work is almost always about man in nature, attempting to make the visible yield the visionary. His writing, Harold Bloom reminds us, confirms his �...
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Critical Essay by Irvin Ehrenpreis
Ammons deals with his world immediately. The macrocosm and microcosm of nature occupy his imagination, and he defines himself by his way of facing these ultimate cha...
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Critical Essay by Helen Vendler
Ever since Schiller distinguished naive from sentimental poetry, we have been worried by the pathetic fallacy (as Ruskin named it). It is the aesthetic version of the t...
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Critical Essay by Charles Fishman
Few human beings inhabit the typical Ammons landscape—indeed, the poems that home toward the center of his visions are landscapes: either literal mappings of p...
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A(rchie) R(andolph) Ammons
