A. R. Ammons
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A.R. Ammons
- Born: 1926
- Birthplace: Whiteville, NC
- Died: February 25, 2001
Archie Randolph Ammons began writing poetry during World War II, while he served in the navy. He continued to write during the periods when he worked as a real estate salesman, an editor, an executive in his father's glass company, and a teacher at Cornell University. Ammons wrote nearly thirty books of poetry, among them Collected Poems 1951-1971, which won the National Book Award in 1972; Sphere, winner of the Bollingen Prize in 1974; A Coast of Trees, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry in 1981; and Garbage, which won the National Book Award and the Library of Congress's Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry in 1993.
Among his many other honors are the Academy's Wallace Stevens Award, the Poetry Society of America's Robert Frost Medal, the Ruth Lilly Prize, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was Goldwin Smith Professor of Poetry at Cornell University until his retirement in 1998.
Most Famous Works
- Ommateum, with Doxology (1955)
- Expressions of Sea Level (1964)
- Corsons Inlet (1965)
- Tape for the Turn of the Year (1965)
- Northfield Poems (1966)
- Selected Poems (1968)
- Uplands (1970)
- Briefings: Poems Small and Easy (1971)
- Collected Poems: 1951-1971 (1972)
- Sphere: The Form of a Motion (1974)
- Diversifications (1975)
- The Snow Poems (1977)
- Highgate Road (1977)
- The Selected Poems: 1951-1977 (1977)
- Selected Longer Poems (1980)
- A Coast of Trees (1981)
- Worldly Hopes (1982)
- Lake Effect Country (1983)
- The Selected Poems: Expanded Edition (1986)
- Sumerian Vistas (1987)
- The Really Short Poems (1991)
- Garbage (1993)
- The North Carolina Poems (1994)
- Brink Road (1996)
- Glare (1997)
- Set in Motion: Essays, Interviews, and Dialogues (1996)
Ammons, A. R. (Archie Randolph Ammons), 1926-2001, American poet, b. Whiteville, N.C., grad. Wake Forest College (1949). He began writing poetry while serving in the Navy during World War II, and, after working as a school principal and sales executive, he taught creative writing (1964-71) at Cornell. His second book of poetry, Expressions of Sea Level (1964), established him as a major American poet and exhibited his characteristic tone and themes: conversational free verse that frequently deals with the interrelationship of human beings and nature in a modern echo of transcendentalism. His other books of poetry include Tape for the Turn of the Year (1965), Collected Poems 1951-1971 (1972, National Book Award), Sphere (1974, Bollingen Prize), Garbage (1993, National Book Award), Glare (1996), and the posthumously published Bosh and Flapdoodle (2005).
Bibliography
See Z. Burr, ed., Set in Motion: Essays, Interviews, and Dialogues/A. R. Ammons (1996); studies by A. Holder (1978), H. Bloom, ed. (1986), R. Kirschten, ed. (1997), S. P. Schneider, ed. (1999), and D. Burak and R. Gilbert, ed. (2005).
Houghton Mifflin Chronology of US Literature:
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Works by A. R. Ammons
(1926-2001)
| 1955 | Ommateum with Doxology. Ammons's first collection displays his characteristic interest in humanity's relationship to nature and the multiple ways of viewing the world. Born in North Carolina, Ammons began writing poetry while serving on a destroyer escort in World War II. After attending Wake Forest and teaching in a small school in New Jersey, Ammons worked as a business executive from 1952 to 1964. |
| 1965 | Corsons Inlet and Tape for the Turn of the Year. The first collection includes the title work, one of Ammons's best-known poems, and the important sequence "Hymn." The second is a 205-page verse diary composed on an adding machine, which uses the narrow width of the paper to determine line length. |
| 1966 | Northfield Poems. Ammons demonstrates a more imagistic style in this collection inspired by nature, which includes works such as "Saliences" and "Discoverer." |
| 1970 | Uplands. Called by critic Harold Bloom the beginning of Ammons's "major phase," the collection features shorter lyrics dealing with the nature of external reality. It includes praised works such as "Snow Log" and "Mountain Talk." |
| 1972 | Collected Poems 1951-1971. This National Book Award-winning collection brings together works from Ammons's first six volumes as well as new works, including the long poems "Extreme Moderations," "Hibernaculum," and "Essay on Poetics." |
| 1974 | Sphere: The Form of a Motion. Ammons's book-length poem, considered by many his finest long poem, is a diverse meditation organized by the concept of the sphere and the search for unity and wholeness. |
| 1977 | The Snow Poems. Ammons's collection, a long sequence in the form of a poetic diary, details daily life and the poet's wrestling with his craft. |
| 1981 | A Coast of Trees. Ammons's collection includes poems such as "Getting Through," "Eventually Is Soon Enough," "Density," and "Vehicle," dealing with the poet's observations during his walks, periods of observation, and writing. Critics admire his deft linking of personal and everyday experience with the rhythms of nature. |
| 1987 | Sumerian Vistas. This collection, inspired by various landscapes, includes the powerful lyrical sequence "Tombstones" and the Whitmanesque "The Ridge Farm." |
| 1993 | Garbage. This National Book Award-winning collection is an eighteen-section, 2,200-line poem composed on adding machine tape and constituting a meditation on the implications of trash, that is, the remains of all life-forms. |
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