Archie Randolph Ammons was an American poet, novelist and essayist. he was awarded the reputed National Book of Award for poetry. He specialized in writing about subjects pertaining to relationship between nature and humanity while attributing humor and awe-inspiring tones. His poetry preached transcendental mixture of religious and philosophical matters garnished with the complex relationship of nature and the soul. He went on to receive accolades such as National Book Critics Circle Award and Bollingen Prize for Poetry for his work in A Coast of Trees and Sphere: The Form of a Motion respectively. He received the most restigious 'National Book of Award' for poetry twice for his works Collected Poems and Garbage. His prominent prose writing works include Set in Motion: Essays, Interviews, and Dialogues (1996) and An Image for Longing: Selected Letters and Journals of A.R. Ammon. While many critics applaud the work of Ammons, some accuse of his work in familiar lines with Emerson, Whitman and Emily Dickinson. Let us go through some of the famous quotes from this legendary American poet, highlighting his thoughts and sayings
I must stress here the point that I appreciate clarity, order, meaning, structure, rationality: they are necessary to whatever provisional stability we have, and they can be the agents of gradual and successful change.
Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.
A. R. Ammons
Anything looked at closely becomes wonderful.
A. R. Ammons
Even if you walk exactly the same route each time - as with a sonnet - the events along the route cannot be imagined to be the same from day to day, as the poet's health, sight, his anticipations, moods, fears, thoughts cannot be the same.
I am grateful for - though I can't keep up with - the flood of articles, theses, and textbooks that mean to share insight concerning the nature of poetry.
If we ask a vague question, such as, 'What is poetry?' we expect a vague answer, such as, 'Poetry is the music of words,' or 'Poetry is the linguistic correction of disorder.'
The reeds give
way to the
wind and give
the wind away
A. R. Ammons
Reflective
I found a
weed
that had a
mirror in it
and that
mirror
looked in at
a mirror
in
me that
had a
weed in it
A. R. Ammons
Besides the actual reading in class of many poems, I would suggest you do two things: first, while teaching everything you can and keeping free of it, teach that poetry is a mode of discourse that differs from logical exposition.
You came one day and
as usual in such matters
significance filled everything-
your eyes, the things you
knew, the way you turned,
leaned, stood, or sat,
this way or that.
A poem generated by its own laws may be unrealized and bad in terms of so-called objective principles of taste, judgement, deduction.
A. R. Ammons
I can't tell you where a poem comes from, what it is, or what it is for: nor can any other man. The reason I can't tell you is that the purpose of a poem is to go past telling, to be recognised by burning.
That's a wonderful change that's taken place, and so most poetry today is published, if not directly by the person, certainly by the enterprise of the poet himself, working with his friends.
A. R. Ammons
The poet exposes himself to the risk. All that has been said about poetry, all that he has learned about poetry, is only a partial assurance.
A. R. Ammons
Each poem in becoming generates the laws by which it is generated: extensions of the laws to other poems never completely take.
Questions structure and, so, to some extent predetermine answers.
A. R. Ammons
For though we often need to be restored to the small, concrete, limited, and certain, we as often need to be reminded of the large, vague, unlimited, unknown.
