Archibald Randolph Ammons (February 18, 1926 – February 25, 2001) was an American poet and professor of English at Cornell University. Ammons published nearly thirty collections of poems in his lifetime. Revered for his impact on American romantic poetry, Ammons received several major awards for his work, including two National Book Awards for Poetry, one in 1973 for Collected Poems and another in 1993 for Garbage.

Poetic themes

Literary critics have associated Ammons with earlier poets of the American romantic tradition, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman. He is also regarded for his witty—and sometimes coarse—humor, which balances out the gravity of his transcendentalist themes. After the war, Ammons attended Wake Forest University, majoring in biology. Graduating in 1949, he served as a principal and teacher at Hattaras Elementary School later that year and also married Phyllis Plumbo. He received an M.A. in English from the University of California, Berkeley.

In 1964, Ammons joined the faculty of Cornell University, eventually becoming Goldwin Smith Professor of English and Poet in Residence. He retired from Cornell in 1998. His students who went on to achieve acclaim as poets include Alice Fulton, Ann Loomis Silsbee, and Jerald Bullis.

Ammons had been a longtime resident of the South Jersey communities of Northfield, Ocean City and Millville, when he wrote Corsons Inlet in 1962.

Ammons at Cornell University

When Ammons arrived at Cornell University in 1964 to teach creative writing, he had not yet finished his master's degree at the University of California, Berkeley. While somewhat self-conscious about his lack of academic pedigree compared to his colleagues, Ammons established himself quickly by completing and publishing six well-received volumes and earning tenure in 1969. Ammons met literary critic Harold Bloom, who visited Cornell in 1968 as a fellow of the Society for the Humanities. Both from North Carolina, Ammons and Morgan bonded over their similar upbringings; and though they embraced distinct poetic styles, the two poets praised each other's work throughout their careers.

Awards

During the five decades of his poetic career, Ammons was the recipient of many awards and citations. Among his major honors are the 1973 and 1993 U.S. National Book Awards (for Collected Poems, 1951–1971 and for Garbage);

Ammons's other awards include a 1981 National Book Critics Circle Award for A Coast of Trees; a 1993 Library of Congress Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry for Garbage; the 1975 Bollingen Prize for Sphere; the Poetry Society of America's Robert Frost Medal; the Ruth Lilly Prize; and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1978.

Poetic style

Ammons commonly writes in two- or three-line stanzas, in which lines are unrhymed and strongly enjambed. Some of Ammons's poems are as short as one to two lines. Others, like Ammons's book-length poems Sphere, Tape for the Turn of the Year, and Garbage, are hundreds of lines long.

Ammons is noted for his idiosyncratic, minimalist approach to punctuation.

  • Sphere: The Form of a Motion. New York: Norton, 1974. —winner of the Bollingen Prize for Poetry
  • Diversifications. New York: Norton, 1975.
  • The Selected Poems: 1951–1977. New York: Norton, 1977.
  • Highgate Road. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1977.
  • The Snow Poems . New York: Norton, 1977.
  • Selected Longer Poems. New York: Norton, 1980.
  • A Coast of Trees. New York: Norton, 1981. – winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award
  • Worldly Hopes. New York: Norton, 1982.
  • Lake Effect Country. New York: Norton, 1983.
  • The Selected Poems: Expanded Edition. New York: Norton, 1986.
  • Sumerian Vistas. New York: Norton, 1987.
  • The Really Short Poems. New York: Norton, 1991.
  • Garbage. New York: Norton, 1993. – winner of the National Book Award
  • The North Carolina Poems. Alex Albright, ed. Rocky Mount, NC: NC Wesleyan College P, 1994.
  • Brink Road.New York: Norton, 1996.
  • Glare. New York: Norton, 1997.
  • Bosh and Flapdoodle: Poems. New York: Norton, 2005.
  • Selected Poems. David Lehman, ed. New York: Library of America, 2006.
  • The North Carolina Poems. New, expanded edition. Frankfort, KY: Broadstone Books, 2010.
  • The Mule Poems. Fountain, NC: R. A. Fountain, 2010. (chapbook)
  • The Complete Poems of A. R. Ammons, Volume 1 1955–1977; Volume 2 1978–2005: Edited by Robert M. West; Introduction by Helen Vendler. W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., New York, 2017 hardcover vol. 1; hardcover vol. 2

Prose

  • An Image for Longing: Selected Letters and Journals of A.R. Ammons, 1951–1974. Ed. Kevin McGuirk. Victoria, BC: ELS Editions, 2014.

Critical studies and reviews of Ammons's work

  • Diacritics 3 (1973). An entire "essays on Ammons" issue.
  • Review of A.R. Ammons, The Complete Poems.

References

  • Examples of Ammons poetry
  • A.R. Ammons Audio Collection Z. Smith Reynolds Library, Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, North Carolina
  • A.R. Ammons Interviewed by David Grossvogel
  • Reid and Susan Overcash Literary Collection: A.R. Ammons Papers (#1096-001), East Carolina Manuscript Collection, J.Y. Joyner Library, East Carolina University
  • A.R. Ammons Papers 1944–1987 Southern Historical Collection, Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina
  • Guide to the Archie Ammons Papers, 1945–2010, Division of Rare and Special Collections, Cornell University Library, Ithaca, New York
  • Modern American Poetry, critical essays on Ammons's works