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 is a prophet in the sense that E. M. Forster meant the word—not that he predicts outbreaks of war or encounters with handsome strangers but that he speaks as though inspired. A glance at some of the shorter poems (using the texts in Selected Poems 1951–1977 and Diversifications) bears this out. In an early one, "Bees Stopped", the persona derives complete satisfaction from his understanding of nature's quiet but ceaseless activity…. In another early poem, "The Wide Land", nature's noisier aspects are broached, but still the persona is happy. The wind blinds him and then apologizes, yet the doughty persona is unflappable…. Bee song or blizzard: anything nature throws his way is fine with him.

Lest this persona seem smug and overweening, a third poem from roughly the same period should be cited as evidence that he is taking his vatic duties seriously. In "Choice" the persona comes to a stair that goes in both directions. He spurns "the airless heights" and sinks into what seems to be "the inundating dark", but there is a surprise in store…. Though he tries to descend, the persona ends in a place much like the airless heights he wanted to avoid. The idiot happiness of the two earlier poems is absent here; the persona takes seriously his struggles with a deceitful god and reveals that he is aware of the serious and possibly dangerous implications of "loose stones" and "sudden alterations of height".

The persona's awareness of his awareness grows as Ammons's career develops. In "Dunes" and "Center" he says "Firm ground is not available ground" and "nothing gets/caught at all". A superb short poem entitled "Mountain Talk" …, combines the persona's joy in nature (which characterizes "Bees Stopped" and "The Wide Land") with his understanding of his inability to apprehend nature (as seen in "Dunes" and "Center")….

[In such short poems as "Mountain Talk", it] is clear that Ammons is bearing out William James's belief that you ought not to distinguish where you cannot divide, yet sometimes you must. Temperatures have to be taken, cuts to be made. The trick is to cut cleanly, and there are few surgeons tidier than Ammons. His short lines, his overall brevity, his avoidance of punctuation marks other than the occasional comma and that quick stop-and-go colon are the hallmarks of his minimalism, his exquisitely unencumbered technique. "For Harold Bloom", the last poem in Selected Poems 1951–1977 and one of the longest poems in the book (though it is only a page), expresses the persona's struggle with the central paradox of Ammons's poetry, namely, that it is necessary to distinguish though never adequate. The poem that expresses best the poet's (especially the prophet-poet's) need to continue is "Measure", which says that the objects of nature "promote the measure" and that there is no "other measure but man". The trick is to measure in the most judicious and subtle way.

For some reason the critics who have attempted to take Ammons's own measure have been prone to use other writers as their yardsticks. His thought and art has been compared to that of Henry Vaughan, Sir Thomas Browne, D'Arcy Thompson, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Pound, Eliot, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Roethke, Dylan Thomas, and Robert Creeley. A list of such length of poets of such brilliance almost precludes additional comparisons, but perhaps its self-evident appropriateness will permit the suggestion of one more name: that of Stephen Crane. His other roots notwithstanding. Ammons characteristically writes like Crane at his best (though Crane was not at his best very often, at least as a poet)…. What makes Ammons's poetry technically closer to Crane's than anyone else's are not only its minimalist characteristics but also the recurrent and perhaps conscious sophomorisms on which both writers rely. Both of them have personae who wrestle with gods and talk to the wind. Both use words like "foreverness" (Ammons) and "impenetrableness" (Crane). Both have in common the stock poetic situations, the abstractions, the poems so brief that they seem more the jottings of the apprentice who wants to be known as poet than the attempts of the maturing artist who wants to perfect his craft. The odd thing is that both writers, and especially Ammons, manage to pull it off. All great ideas are simple, as Tolstoy said, but he might have added that it takes a great artist to present great ideas simply. Ammons is such an artist, which is why he is one of a handful of American lyric poets meant to be read again and again.

[As indicated by the recently published Selected Longer Poems, his] achievement as a writer of long poems is another matter, however. Not that any writer of long poems has it easy. Even the best of us have a built-in resistance to length in literature…. But literature abounds with splendid long poems: in America alone there is Whitman's Song of Myself, Hart Crane's The Bridge, Williams's Paterson, Stevens's Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction, Eliot's Four Quartets, Pound's Cantos, W. D. Snodgrass's Hearts Needle, Ginsberg's Howl, and Alvin Greenberg's marvellous but little-known In/Direction. With one exception, though, none of these poets uses the sophormoric language that Ammons employs so successfully in his short poems. (The exception is Whitman, who makes up for the sophomoric language in his long poetry with sheer energy and who, paradoxically, fails when he uses the same language in his short poems, which are often flaccid and tired.) And that is the problem. Ammons is a prophet, a vatic poet. Yet oracular utterances are gnomic, not windy; when they become windy, we lose interest and turn away. In Ammons's short poems, sophomoric language resonates long after we finish reading; in the long poems, the resonances come one upon another, and the effect, if there is any effect at all, is discordant and finally numbing. Someone with some Sitzfleisch may find Ammons's Essay on Poetics, one of the poems in [Selected Longer Poems], a masterpiece, but I found it "a project" (as Ammons calls it in the last line) that helped the poet while away a snowstorm.

And yet one of these five longer poems is a work of sustained artistry that ranks with any on the list above. In Summer Session, Ammons's persona is a teacher whose gentle ruminations range from wry advice to his students … to voluptuous reminiscences of picnics alfresco…. What sets this longer poem apart from the others is its use of sophomoric language comically … and its avoidance of it otherwise….

Alas, that leaves the Essay on Poetics and three other poems like it which are "projects" for the snowbound poet. Prophecy is essentially a Mediterranean art; perhaps poets who don't live in sunny climes should realize that there is nothing wrong with writing novels and cook-books.