SOURCE: "The Poetry of A. R. Ammons," in The South Carolina Review, Vol. 12, No. 1, Fall, 1979, pp. 2-9.

[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's integration with the universe.]

We can scarcely read a literary review or critical essay these days without finding the word post-modern. One critic has even described certain writers as post-contemporary. These usages of post-, paralleled by equally frequent occurrences of neo- in combination with romanticism, realism, or experimentalism, might be a mere passing semantic fad, but more likely they suggest a pervasive sense of cultural transition. As one reviewer has put it, the transition has progressed to the point that our literature is "no longer 'post-modernist' but 'pre-something.'" Perhaps other critics are saying the same thing when they recognize no literary orthodoxy. Nevertheless, some critics still insist that modernism is not over. Despite the deaths of all the great moderns and our lengthening distance from the peak of modernism, these critics say that modernist poetry continues in different ways. One critic speaks of early moderns and late moderns. Others use the term for its mystique. Still others use the label modern only as a term of convenience or habit, more in its popular sense of now than in its critical sense of a body of writing that flourished in the teens and twenties of this century and had certain definite characteristics, such as repudiation of rhetoric, a reliance on formalist techniques of myth, symbol, and subjective states, an ironical, analytic detachment, and a numbing sense of alienation and nihilism.

If we define modernism by two of these most essential features—first, its impersonality, its formal separation of art and reality, its attraction to personae and fictions to live by, as in Pound, Yeats, Eliot, and Stevens—and, second, by its hollow despair, its inability to accept absolutes, we cannot help being struck by the newer tendencies of certain representative contemporary poets to take the opposite attitude of demythologizing the poem, of personalizing it, of blurring the line between art and reality, and of making more than tentative attempts to re-attach man to his world within a context of faith. I refer mainly to the recent work of Robert Lowell and A. R. Ammons but also to such poets as Allen Ginsberg and Imamu Amiri Baraka (formerly LeRoi Jones). The latter two are special cases, and Lowell is already well recognized as probably our major contemporary or post-modernist poet. He abandoned the mythic approach for the semi-autobiographical, and in 1973 in The Dolphin, he surprised us all with his optimism, his "heaviness lifted."

To develop this controversial point of an emerging postmodernist sensibility, I shall therefore concentrate on A. R. Ammons, who is less well known than the others in spite of his recent winning of the National Book Award in 1972 for his Collected Poems and the Bollingen Prize in 1974 for his latest book Sphere. I realize the risks of oversimplification in arguing that a post-modernist sensibility can be demonstrated at this point and that it can be reduced to two features. I make the assertion less as dogma than as a hypothesis, something to be explored. But the truth is that some kind of break has definitely been taking place since the 1950s and that essentially it includes a blurring of the line between poetic art and reality and an urge to religious synthesis. Let us look at these phenomena in the poetry of A. R. Ammons.

Ammons began his poetic career in 1955 as a descendant of the wasteland poets in a little book called Ommateum. It is clearly modernist in technique and tone. The dominant image is that of a mythic wanderer, a sort of priestly poet or kingly exiled figure, often nameless, often named Ezra or Gilgamesh, one who seeks wisdom for himself and restoration for his people. He shuffles over the dry desert land, over "the bleached and broken fields," over the ravaged cities, hoping to hear the eternal word in the wind, but "there were no echoes from the waves." "The sap is gone out of the trees." There is only a "great vacuity." Death, disease, war, and destruction stalk the land and leave it in ashes. Wells are polluted and yield only muddy water, beer cans, and innertubes; there is scant shade under the willow trees. The wanderer is as often dead as alive and yet finds some minimum insight in this dying state. Coming to a primitive shore, he is killed by an aborigine's arrow shot in his throat. Although taken off by the wind, he returns to find his own dry bones, draws pictures with one of his ribs in the sand, and sings Devonshire airs. He dies in a more "mirthful place" and hears the buzzards engaged over him in talk that sounds "excellent to my eternal ears" while they wait for a "savoring age to come."

The book shows the obvious influence of Eliot's The Waste Land but contains a few more hints of redemption, as in the desire to experience an eternal unity beyond the flux, the image of working in the barn by a sheaf of light torn from a sunbeam, a love affair with a lion at a waterhole, and especially the various miracles of moonlight, grass, and autumn harvest. In "When I Set Fire to the Reed Patch," Ammons experiences not only pleasure and beauty but "mulch for next year's shoots/ the greenest hope/ autumn ever/ left this patch of reeds."

Eight years later, in 1963, in his second book, Expressions of Sea Level, Ammons abandoned the formalist imagery of the mythic wasteland and the hollow despair. He describes the familiar landscape of farms and inlets of his youth in Whiteville, North Carolina. Instead of the dramatic masque of the wandering Ezra-Gilgamesh figure, he adopts the more general speech of meditation. Instead of a forlorn search for faith, apocalyptic and surrealistic, he focuses on a belief in an orderly world in which finite and natural boundaries reflect an immense universal order. We live amid these forms, these "expressions of sea level," he writes, on the periphery of being, far from the center, yet not so far that we do not recognize the unity of creation in its multitudinous identities and motions, its mysterious comings and goings, its harmonious and wonderful operations. The book celebrates this sense of union and order in the universe: "an order of instinct prevails/ through all accidents of circumstances," he writes in "Identity." Along the edge, the crust, one can find "disorder ripe,/ entropy rich, high levels of random,/ numerous occasions of accident." But these multitudinous forms or modes are possible because the "underlying" essence is "all and/ beyond destruction/ because created fully in no/ particular form." We cannot know the essence, only "its forms, the motions …/ its/ permanence," but we know the essence is there because its manifestations work so well and appear so universally. Therefore the poet in "Raft" drifts out through the inlet to the sea, letting "the currents be/ whatever they would be,/ allowing possibility/ to chance/ where choice/ could not impose itself." In "Hymn" he says he will find this eternal essence both by leaving the earth and by staying:

and if I find you I must go out deep into your far resolutions
and if I find you I must stay here with the separate leaves.

The book represents a striking departure from the modernist sensibility in which the poem is artifice and man is cut off from his world. Ammons is both a neo-romantic and a pragmatist, fusing certain modern scientific principles of indeterminacy and closed structures with an older Platonic metaphysics of matter and form and of the one and the many.

In his subsequent books of short lyrics—Corson's Inlet, Northfield Poems, Uplands, and Briefings in the 1960s and early 1970s—Ammons, for the most part, expands and illustrates his theories of peripheries and identities of nature. The bulk of his output consists of short nature poems about the familiar objects in his experience—inlets, dunes, rivers, animals, butterfly weeds, morning glories, pea vines, a favorite mule, and trees in the snow. He invites his friends to visit him and see the glories of nature, to be blessed as he by the destruction of self in the epiphanies of natural experience, be "released from forms" into the "eddies of meaning" and into the transcendental mysteries of the "overall" presence. He has his dark moments, his struggles and losses; he knows violence and change; but he consistently holds to a world of open possibilities and the pervasive order of objects perceivable by the human mind and traceable to a vitality at the core. Ammons comes close to a Whitmanesque absorption into the One but strives to maintain a wholesome pragmatic balance between the oneness and the manyness of reality. Facts are facts, regardless of the freedom of philosophy, and he insists that we take the world as we sense it. With a similar stubbornness, he insists that we take the spiritual essence as we intuit it. In many of his poems, he professes to talk to mountains, rivers, and trees but wisely recognizes that his capacity for synthesis and flexibility of perspective makes man superior to, if slightly confused by, these other stable identities that he can take apart and re-order ("Zone"). As he says in "Poetics" (from Briefings), he looks for ways that things will turn out spiraling from a center.

In the midst of these personal nature lyrics spoken in his own voice, Ammons departed still further from the modernist sensibility of mythical analysis by writing a spontaneous autobiographical book-length poem, Tape for the Turn of the Year. With this work he explicitly joined the postmodernist movement begun ten years earlier by Ginsberg and Lowell. The Beats had aggressively challenged the modernist theory of the objective correlative of subliminal experience. They had advocated direct autobiographical treatment of reality and favored spontaneity over art. They argued too that the intellectual imposition of form on expression distorted reality. In Life Studies of 1960 Lowell had likewise departed from his earlier modernist works by demythologizing poetry in the confessional mode. Ammons' Tape similarly blurs the line between reality and art. Inserting an adding-machine tape into his typewriter, he proceeded to write ajournai of his feelings, reminiscences, thoughts, and activities—a "long thin poem," he called it—between early December, 1963, and early January, 1964. "Anti-art and nonclassical," the book ridicules both the modernist and classical theories of poetry as artificial and obscure. Ammons accepts the "frazzling reality" of his daily life as more genuine, a "way of going along with the world as it is": "I care about the statement/ of fact:/ the true picture/ has a beauty higher/ than Beauty." He put the idea better ten years later in Sphere when he scoffed at the tightly made modernist poem: "I don't know about you, but I'm sick of good poems, all those little rondures/ splendidly brought off, painted gourds on a shelf." In Sphere and in Tape he wanted to write something more personal, something massive, more synthesizing, something that touches "the universal anywhere you touch it everywhere." Yet he was not fully satisfied with the artlessness of Tape and concluded at that time that one cannot get too free: reality has to accept some form because form, as he is fond of saying, is part of reality; the identities of matter have their confinements though seemingly looser than the strict oneness of the center. Tape therefore is only a temporary launching, an experiment to see how far spontaneity will go without much imposed order, and it will not go very far. He returned to his short lyrics of natural insights until he finally devised a series of more controlled verse-essays or lectures to provide the "play-shapes" that satisfied him.

The first of these verse-essays, "Essay on Poetics," defines poetry as a synthesizing principle. A poem, he says, draws out the multiple stimuli of reality, those essential designs and configurations that curve to the wholeness of meaning. Language is a level of abstraction that only appears to suppress reality while actually holding it in a stasis: "poems are arresting in two ways: they attract attention with/ glistery astonishment and they hold it: stasis: they gather and/ stay: the progression is from sound and motion to silence and rest." The poem must not violet the bits and pieces of reality but must tidy them up. There is a living organism in life's structures, and the poet's task is to locate that law at the centers of the various blobs and clusters so as to find their meanings and preserve the living core. Ammons' tone is slightly whimsical, and the view of poetry is not new: as others have noted, it is Whitmanesque. What is mainly interesting is the almost banal perspective of a lecturer trying out illustrations, deliberately avoiding the "locked clarity" of finished poem for a "linear"—perhaps he means rhetorical—mode that keeps open all options and possibilities of thought. To Ammons, poetry is "fun," a "superior amusement." He deplores the "Scoffers," the "party-poopers who are/ afraid they ought to believe in history or logical positivism and/ don't have any real desire to do so: they are scarcely worth a/ haircut: organisms, I can tell you, build up under the trust of joy and nothing else can lift them out of the miry circumstances: … poems are pure joy, however divisionally they sway with grief: the way to joy is integration's delivery of the complete lode…." As did Tape for the Turn of the Year, this long poem repudiates the Pound-Eliot-Yeats-Stevens tradition of recondite myth and the cynical historical complicators of the very simple romantic truth of a harmonious creative center.

In a second lecture-poem called "Extremes and Moderations" Ammons delights in this great principle of harmonious balance that moderates nature's extremes of winds, floods, lightning, and body sickness, but he expresses fear that human beings have technologically tampered with nature so as to upset the balances. Such things as factories, automobiles, and chemical insecticides have jeopardized the balancing principle: "blue green globe, we have tipped your balance/ though we have scalded and oiled the seas and/ scabbed the land and smoked the mirror of heaven, we must try/ to stay and keep those who are alive alive." Like Blake and Hopkins and others before him, he believes that nature's balances are superior to our own and that we are headed for destruction unless we can align our psychic forces with nature's. Extreme calls to extreme, and moderation is losing its effect and quality. Yet all is not dreary; he has faith that we shall recognize our folly and save our world.

The third of these lectures, "Hibernaculum," attempts more ambitiously than the earlier verse-essays to define the poet's own emerging mental and physical identity. It catalogues the welter and tangle of his sensations that are bursting into a recognizable personality. He sees himself coexisting with nature without conscious will. Compared, however, to Whitman's brilliant poems on the subject of the self's becoming—"Song of Myself and "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry"—Ammons' poem is unsuccessful. It does exactly what he says he hopes he will not do: "I must not when I get up on/ the soapbox wash out." The bobs and bits never synthesize, and the tone is proudly clever rather than penetrating. A few isolated passages are splendid, but earlier shorter poems about nature—"Identity," "Risks and Possibilities," "Expressions of Sea Level," "Gravelly Run," "Corson's Inlet"—say much better what he seems to be trying to say here about his own identity as a consciously complex person in the process of organizing his various multiplicities.

Ammons' Sphere reaffirms the ideas of the one-many and center-periphery that have guided his thought for more than fifteen years. It brilliantly succeeds in showing the underlying unity of diversity that leads up to the Most High. It is the finest of his autobiographical verse-essays, a meditative philosophical lecture on the unifying forces in nature. It is also a work in the grand American tradition of Emerson-Thoreau-Whitman-Frost, the blend of the practical and the idealistic, the semi-cantankerous and garrulous amateur thinker eliciting universal meanings from commonplace details. It is a joyous book, a celebration of living, a humble awareness of the mysteries of cycles and changes.

Beginning with a statement of his usual theme of the mystery of an integrated universe, Ammons proceeds to illustrate its working in lively examples: sexual imagery, geometric imagery, the seasonal changes, nature's ways of renewals and balancings, the eternal springing of water in a well, numerous kinds of objects like chairs or fictions that imitate the ideas of these things, daily routines that identify him, history ever on the move toward newer meanings, biological formations, and so on—a constant flux of organization and divine recreation in which "fragments/ cease to be fragmentary and work together in a high flotation." It is one long ecstatic book-length sentence of 1,860 lines arranged into 155 numbered sections of four three-line stanzas. Like Whitman, Ammons addresses "vague hosannas: evaporation without arithmetic of loss." He feels so blessed that he invites others to join him: "send folks over: I have/ plenty to pass around …/ I go/ on the confidence that in this whole magnificence nothing is/ important, why should this be, yet everything is, even this/ as it testifies to the changing and staying." Abandon your scrambling for social status, he chides modern man: "let go and let your humanity rise to its natural/ height, said the star, and you will in that smallness be as/ great as I." The attitude extends to patriotism as well. He ecstatically praises his country and its citizens and attacks the radical, nay-saying, unpatriotic tradition:

And what he keeps straight is the unity, the federation, the comradeship, the continuing possibilities:

But he has no intention of radicalizing or politicizing, only of asserting hope and reassurance, of singing "that tireless river system of streaming/ unity: my country: my country; can't cease from its/ sizzling rufflings to move into my 'motions' and 'stayings'":

when I identify my self, my work, and my country, you may
think I've finally got the grandeurs….

His hope is to achieve "a broad sanction that gives range/ to life," to achieve a "context in which the rose can keep its edges out of/ frost" and in which the "knots of misery, depression, and disease can/ unwind into abundant resurgence."

Often facetious and witty, often a bit tedious and overblown, Sphere is never merely clever or dull for long. It securely grounds its observations, unlike the other essay poems, on a progression of events, natural and human, that take place during one season: the melting snow of spring, the blast-off of Apollo 16, "April 23rd and still not a daffodil," returning from a trip to Baltimore on April 29 to find daffodils in bloom, the first mowing of the lawn, a cook-out at a friend's house on May 6, planting a garden, trimming a quince, being chased by a hornet while picking veronica from the lawn. In this respect the poem resembles Walden as well as Leaves of Grass, a kind of writing in which the assertions lead to concretes and the concretes rise again to universals.

Only in the most careless meaning of the term modern is Ammons a modernist poet in Sphere. He has rejected nearly everything that the modernists stood for. Like the other post-moderns he has extolled personality, blurred the line between art and reality, demythologized the poem. He is no confessionalist of a broken life, no advocate of poems-as-bullets, no extremist as A. Alvarez has called Plath, who tragically fulfilled the meaning of her poems in her suicidal death. He has rediscovered his own kind of personal expression, the lecture, the verse-essay, the Emersonian sermon. More than any of the others of his time he has attempted to re-integrate man into a whole person in a whole nation in a whole world, a part of a synthesis of man, nature, and God. He is the new poet of hope and faith, national and cosmic, who prophesies a "climb/ up the low belly of this sow century, through the seventies,/ eighties, right on upward to the attachments, the anterior/ or posterior fixation, anything better than the swung pregnancies of these evil years."

A movement as pervasive and successful as modernism will not succumb easily to change. It will continue to shape the work of contemporary poets for years to come. Yet Ammons is only one of several poets in the past fifteen years who has challenged the formalist theories and practice of modernism, not only by outright argument but by the more glacial emergence of a new sensibility. In the process he has lost some of the dramatic intensity that we associate with modernist poetry, but he has made up for the loss in urbane phrasing and the energy of a new affirmation.