SOURCE: "The Poetry of A. R. Ammons: Some Notes and Reflections," in Salmagundi, Nos. 22-23, Spring-Summer, 1973, pp. 285-93.

[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 Visionary Poetry (1982). In the following excerpt, Waggoner compares and contrasts Ammons's poetry to that of Ralph Waldo Emerson.]

What follows is simply some of the thoughts, and a few reflections on those thoughts, that have come to me as I have read through seven volumes of [Ammons'] poetry, the product of something more than a decade of writing. I do not own, am not near a library that contains, and so have not seen Ammons' first volume, Ommateum (1955), an omission which must qualify anything I may say about Ammons' development.

I write these notes seated in a mountain meadow, facing north towards a spruce woods fringed with poplar and balsam fir, the short-lived forward units of the woods as it edges across an unused pasture beyond the meadow. I have been watching the woods take over the pasture for more than thirty years now but have seen no movement. All I know is that the woods are a hundred or so feet closer to engulfing the spot where I sit and the house behind me than they used to be, and from that I can deduce that they are coming toward us all the time, moving in stillness.

So much for the permanencies of nature. I find this helping me to understand and respond to a good deal of Ammons' poetry, in which nature is the subject, the exemplum, or the setting of a good many of the best passages and poems.

Ammons is a visionary poet in the Neoplatonic tradition introduced and best represented in our (American) poetry by Emerson. I would guess that he has read a good deal of Emerson and pondered much on what he has read. Maybe not. Maybe he has read only a little and gotten all his Emersonianism from that little, working out for himself, as Emerson did, the consequences of a few major ideas about the relations of the Many and the One. Or maybe it has come to him at second and third hand, through Pound and Williams, Whitman and Frost, all of whom make their appearance in his poetry. It is clear at least though that he has read "Brahma"—which could have been sufficient for the right kind of mind—for he alludes to it and paraphrases it in "What This Mode of Motion Said" in Expressions of Sea Level. Emerson: "When me they fly, I am the wings"; Ammons: "I am the wings when you me fly"; Emerson: "I am the doubter and the doubt"; Ammons:

Some other "Emersonianisms" in the poetry. (This could be a full-length article itself. It would have to treat important poems in each of the seven volumes I have read. [In a footnote, the critic adds: For such a study, "Hibernaculum" in the new Collected Poems would be particularly important. In it Emerson is mentioned by name and linked with Plotinus in a passage that seems to me to say in effect, This is the philosophic tradition that means the most to me. Some of the Emersonianisms are jocular, as when Ammons finds in Shakespeare the same virtues and same defect that Emerson had found, then adds that he is cheered by this because "I can't reconcile the one with the many either."]) "Raft," the opening poem in Expressions of Sea Level, a somewhat self-consciously Romantic poem in which the sought-for unity with nature—or with the undefinable Reason behind nature—is distanced by a tone of playful make-believe, is central Emerson: let go, yield, be blown by the winds of spirit. Spiritus: breath, wind. The Muse, the deeper self, the Holy Spirit. The boy on the circular raft is swept out to sea by the tides to where the winds control his motion toward the east, the rising sun. Neoplatonists: sun, source of light, life, and goodness; emanation. Christian Neoplationists: sun = Son…. The Romantic sea-voyage; the "innocent eye" of the child. Several poems in the same volume make explicit what "Raft" implies by the story it tells. For instance, "Guide": "the wind that is my guide said this"; and "Mansion":

The word soul can be used only in actual or implied quotation marks by contemporary poets. Since Ammons takes what the word refers to very seriously, he seldom uses it: there is nothing "so-called" about spirit in his work. Like Emerson, he is ambiguous about what he refuses to name. Emerson usually preferred to define the "Over-Soul," "World-Soul," "The Spirit," "The Real" in negative terms, as he does in the opening of the essay on the subject, following the long tradition of "negative theology." He was surer about Immanence than about Transcendence: "A light from within or from behind," with the ambiguity kept. Only in "Circles," in the early essays, does he drop the subjective-objective ambiguity and attribute unqualified Transcendence to the One: "the eternal generator of circles," that is, the Creator of the circles of physical and spiritual reality. Ammons' poetry keeps both Emerson's theoretic ambiguity and the intensity of Emerson's search for vision.

Ammons has a mind, too good a mind to be content with the kinds of superficial Romanticism that are becoming fashionable in contemporary poetry. I would like to call him a philosophical poet—except that description might turn away some of those who should read him, and except also that the phrase is in part intrinsically misleading in its suggestion that he deals principally in abstractions. He deals with the perfectly concrete felt motions and emotions of the particular self he is and, like Emerson again, looks for and often sees "Correspondences" between these motions and those of animate and inanimate nature, both nature-as-observed (winds, tides, seeds, birds) and nature-as-known-about (the chemistry of digestion, entropy).

The title poem of Corsons Inlet is such a philosophical poem, treating the relations and claims of logic and vision, order created and order discovered, being and becoming, art and nature. Rejecting any "finality of vision," it still prefers the risk of vision to any "easy victory" in "narrow orders, limited tightness." The poet's task is to try to "fasten into order enlarging grasps of disorder," the task Emerson set before the poet in "Merlin" and "Bacchus." I find significance in the fact that the poem was first entitled "A Nature Walk." If there is no order discoverable in nature, the order of art is a contrivance without noetic value. Ammons, like his Romantic and Transcendental poetic forebears, is not content to make pretty, or even interesting because intricately fashioned, poems. "Corsons Inlet" seems to me at once one of the finest and one of the most significant poems written by any of our poets in recent years. It is a credo, a manifesto, a cluster of felt perceptions, and a demonstration that, up to a point at least, vision can be both achieved and conveyed.

Though I am persuaded that my frequent mentions of Emerson up to this point do not distort but rather illuminate Ammons' work, still they might prove misleading if I failed to mention the ways in which the poet's vision is unlike Emerson's. (Emerson, I should explain, is very fresh in my mind these days, for I have just spent a year rereading and writing about him. But I am still not importing my own preoccupation into Ammons' poetry: Emerson is there, and I happen to be well prepared to notice his presence—in many more ways, and more poems, than I have mentioned or will mention.) Let me try to generalize the difference first. Ammons comes as close to rediscovering the Romantic Transcendental vision of Emerson as any thoughtful and well-informed man of the late twentieth century is likely to be able to, but as a man of our time he simply cannot be a "disciple," he can only learn from, be stimulated by, walk the paths of, and be honest about his differences with, the poet who more than any other foreshadows him, as I see it.

A few of the differences. Ammons allows to come into consciousness, and so into his poetry, much more freely than Emerson did, the existential angst that Emerson must have felt but usually repressed. (See "1 Jan." in Tape for the Turn of the Year for Ammons' statement on this. The point he makes there—"I know the/violence, grief, guilt,/despair, absurdity"—is clear in all the volumes without being stated.) Death, disorder, entropy (one of his few technical philosophical terms) are never far from the surface of any of Ammons' poems, and frequently they are central in them. Poetry, he says in Tape, has "one subject, impermanence." Never unaware of "a universe of horror," Ammons knows that "we must bear/ the dark edges of/ our awareness," but the goal of his search remains "a universe of light" (Tape, "1 Jan.").

A different man in a different age, Emerson erected his defenses against fear and grief stronger and taller than Ammons', though I should say that in his best poetry—in prose as well as in verse—he was sufficiently open to all his feelings, even these, to allow his wonderful intelligence to work freely. Still, it is true, however one may take the fact, that Ammons does not transcend so easily or so far.

Related to this as a symptom is to a cause is the much greater concreteness of the way Ammons' imagination works, and so of his poetic language. As Emerson was more concrete, specific, even local (think of the first line of "Hamatreya") than the Pre-Romantics whose style his often resembles, so Ammons is more concrete, specific, local, and personal than Emerson. On this matter, as on style in general, Ammons' affinity seems to be with Pound and Williams, but of course Pound and Williams were more Emersonian than they knew.

A difference that is more strikingly obvious but I think finally less important is that of verse-forms. Emerson's theory, at least the part of it we are most likely to remember, called for organic or open form, but only a few of his best poems put the theory successfully into practice, and then only partially. Ammons, like most of his best contemporaries, has moved all the way toward practicing the theory announced in "The Poet" and elaborated in "Poetry and Imagination." Still, there is not an immeasurable gap, formally speaking, between "Merlin" and "Poetics" in Briefings.

Tape for the Turn of the Year, Ammons' "long thin poem" typed on a roll of adding-machine paper, a poetic journal which keeps turning into a poetic meditation, is the most continuously interesting, the strongest, the finest long poem I have read in I don't know how many years. It is as concrete as The Cantos, but the facts in it are not exotic lore out of the library and they are not illustrations of theories. It is at once personal and historical, like Paterson, but I don't feel, as I do in that poem at times, any attempt to impose the larger meanings. The meanings rise from the facts of personal history, the life the poet led from December 6 to January 10, the meals, the weather, the news, the interruptions, the discrete perceptions, and are presented for just what they are, felt thoughts. Tape proves—for me, anyway—the point Ammons makes in it somewhere, that poetry is "a way of/ thinking about/ truth" even while, as an art form, its distinctiveness is its way of "playing" with language to create untranslatable meanings.

Stylistically, Tape is "good Emerson," not so much in resembling Emerson's poems (though it does resemble them in certain ways, at times) as in following-out Emerson's theory. Transcendental poetic theory puts enormous emphasis on the single word, the single image, the discrete perception that may become an intuition. The short lines of the poem would seem merely stylish if they could not be justified in terms of this aspect of Transcendental Poetics. "Stylish" they may be, but the reason for the style emerges from the lines surprisingly, astonishingly. Prosaic, lyric, meditative, philosophic by turns, Tape is a wonderful poem. Read it.

Ammons' latest poems strike me as showing two developments. Stylistically, they are somewhat less "open," more thought-out, "reasonable," logically disciplined. They have pulled back a little from the letting-go and letting-out of the earlier work. There is less abandon, more control. Stylistically firmer perhaps, they seem to me less daring. Their style might be described as more "mature," but maturity brings losses as well as gains. The transparent eyeball narrows slightly to shield itself against the too-dazzling light. Ammons said toward the end of Tape that after the long, in a sense "dictated," poem he wanted to write short, artful lyrics, and he's doing it. And of course art is artificial. But I hope he will continue to leave openings, cracks maybî, in his conceptual boxes.

In any poet as fine as Ammons, a stylistic change signals a change in sensibility and vision. "Transaction" in Uplands ("I attended the burial of all my rosy feelings") describes the new "resignation" (Is this the right word? I'm not sure.) explicitly, but a good many of the poems in the two latest volumes exhibit it.

In Tape he reminded us—warned us?—that "I care about the statement/ of fact" and suggested that "coming home" meant "a way of/ going along with this/ world as it is:/ nothing ideal," but he still invited us to the dance. Wisdom involves a kind of resignation, I suppose, as one of its elements, but I think of it as contrasting with rashness and inexperience rather than as first cousin to prudence. I should hate to see Ammons become too prudent. I don't think he will.

The most recent poems may be less ambitious philosophically and less openly Romantic-Transcendental in their imaginative questing, but the quest itself has not been abandoned and the conception of how the journey should be undertaken—how thinking, feeling, imagining, responding can find expression and thus be realized, recognized, identified, and shared in a particular verbal object we call "this poem"—has not essentially changed. In the inseparable union of physics and metaphysics in Ammons' imagination, the emphasis may have shifted a little from the meta to the physics, but the union has not been dissolved, as of course it must not be if poetry is to continue to have noetic value. (Heidegger's "What Are Poets For?" in his recent Poetry, Language, Thought is relevant here. What are poets for in a dark time?) "Poetics" in Briefings should send any readers of it who don't remember the essay back to Emerson's "Poetry and Imagination." "Ask the fact for the form." Imagination and circles, imagination and possibility, the expanding spheres of possibility—of apprehension, of recognition, of meaning—finding their forms in poems. Here's the poem:

I look for the way
things will turn
out spiralling from a center,
the shape
things will take to come forth in

so that the birch tree white
touched black at branches
will stand out
wind-glittering
totally its apparent self:

I look for the forms
things want to come as
from what black wells of possibility,
how a thing will
unfold:

not the shape on paper—though
that, too—but the
uninterfering means on paper:
not so much looking for the shape
as being available
to any shape that may be
summoning itself
through me
from the self not mine but ours.

Harold Bloom is quoted on the back cover of Briefings as saying that the lyrics in the book "maintain an utterly consistent purity of detached yet radiant vision." Right on target. But I'd like to shrink the ambiguities of this a bit if I can without putting us and Ammons into a mentalistic box. "Consistent": consistent with all the other lyrics in the volume, yes, but not entirely consistent, in tone or statement, with the best of the earlier lyrics or even with the prayer ("14 Dec") and the several credos (credo: I believe) in Tape. A little more defensive, more guarded, more "intellectually prudent." There's a concern with defining differences: "… keep me from my enemies Vwafered concision and zeal" ("Hymn IV," Briefings.) A fear almost that vision may harden into doctrine.

"Purity": Yes, of style, of tone, of vision too. The wonderful thing is that the purity is at once a purity of style and a purity of vision, in both cases (or perspectives: two sides of the same coin) a unique balance maintained between conflicting perceptions of the One and the Many, the Real and the Actual, etc.—to borrow some Emersonian terms for what is not easily talked about in any terms.

"Detached": "Wafered concision" suggests that the detachment is from High Church zealots who localize "the eternal generator of circles" (Emerson's term in "Circles") in the manageable little round wafer of Communion. But the detachment is equally, I think, from the rationalistic formulations of the ineffable that betray an idolatrous attitude not toward a common substance, bread, but toward the results of a process, directed abstract thought. I say this not from the evidence of this poem, which, by its emphasis, might not seem to prompt it, but from the evidence of the whole corpus of the poetry as I have read it.

"Radiant": No need for clarification (if that's the word for what I'm trying to do) here. "Radiant" in the sense that applies to Blake, Emerson, Whitman, Cummings, Roethke.

"Vision": Right again, of course. But "vision" and "visionary" can be a way of throwing positivistic enemies off the scent. Vision of what? Assuming that God is not a "being" among other beings, and so, being unlimited spatially and temporally ("God is the circle whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere"—the practitioners of the "negative theology," and Emerson, said), is undefinable, still I'd say a sense of God's reality, whether as immanent or as deus absconditus, is everywhere present in the poems and should be recognized, for it does more than anything else (of the many factors at work, some unknown, some unknowable,) to give the poems their special kind of "vision." Heidegger, "What Are Poets For?" again.

I'd like to make the word religious respectable once again among literary critics, rescue it from Freud ("the future of an illusion") and give it to Jung, who used the word not to clobber the naively pious but to point to something real and permanent in human experience. ("Permanent" until now, maybe.) Ammons is a poet of religious vision who is as wary of intellectualist abstractions as he is of pious dogmas. That's the peculiar feature of the "purity" of his "vision," it seems to me. Peculiar in our time, not peculiar if we think of the poetic visionaries who are his ancestors, whether he knows it or not—and he probably does, for he seems to know everything.

The "veracity" of Ammons' poetry (his word, and Emerson's before him, in "Poetry and Imagination"), the sense it creates in us that the radiance, when it comes, is real, discovered, not invented or faked, is causally related, I suspect, to the steadiness with which the poet has looked into the Abyss. The gains for the imagination from such looking are incalculable, but it must be hard on the nerves. One wants to survive as well as write "short rich hard lyrics," as Ammons is doing now. I want Ammons to do both—that is, survive and write. Perhaps the slight narrowing of the eyelids over the transparent eyeballs I seem to detect in the later work is necessary for the survival. But the transparency remains essential to his kind of vision. Dilemma. Poets age, like the rest of us.

I don't try very conscientiously to "keep up" with all the new poetry in the magazines and the slender volumes, but I can say that of the "new" poets I've read since Roethke's death, Ammons seems to me at or near the top. His poetry is, among other things more important, a "sign" granted for the strengthening of the faith, the faith that in a dark time light may still be seen, not invented (no "Supreme Fiction," no fiction at all), by the unguarded eye.

At his best (I don't much like "Summer Session 1968",) Ammons is a highly distinguished poet of religious vision who grants the Transcendence but finds his occupation chiefly in searching out the traces of the Immanence. May he survive, save himself for this, and be visited often by the Muse, indulging as little as may be in the writing of merely fashionable poems.