A. R. Ammons, or Archie Randolph Ammons, (February 18, 1926 – February 25, 2001) was an American author and poet. February 18 is the 49th day of the year in the Gregorian Calendar. ... 1926 (MCMXXVI) was a common year starting on Friday (link will take you to calendar). ... February 25 is the 56th day of the year in the Gregorian Calendar. ... 2001: A Space Odyssey. ... An author is the person who creates a written work, such as a book, story, article or the like. ... A poet is some one who writes poetry. ...

Life

Ammons was born in 1926 and raised in rural North Carolina, near Whiteville, the youngest of a tobacco farmer's three surviving children. Ammons started writing poetry on board a United States destroyer escort in the South Pacific during the World War Two. Upon his return to civilian life he majored in science at Wake Forest University and later did graduate work in English at the University of California, Berkeley. For a year he was principal of the tiny elementary school in the island village of Cape Hatteras. For the better part of a decade he worked at Friedrich & Dimmock Inc. as a sales executive in his father-in-law's biological glass company in Millville, New Jersey. Ammons was poet-in-residence at Cornell University. Official language(s) English Capital Raleigh Largest city Charlotte Area  Ranked 28th  - Total 53,865 sq mi (139,509 km²)  - Width 500 miles (805 km)  - Length 150 miles (240 km)  - % water 9. ... Species Nicotiana acuminata Nicotiana alata Nicotiana attenuata Nicotiana benthamiana Nicotiana clevelandii Nicotiana excelsior Nicotiana forgetiana Nicotiana glauca Nicotiana glutinosa Nicotiana langsdorffii Nicotiana longiflora Nicotiana obtusifolia Nicotiana paniculata Nicotiana plumbagifolia Nicotiana quadrivalvis Nicotiana repanda Nicotiana rustica Nicotianasuaveolens Nicotiana sylvestris Nicotiana tabacum Nicotiana tomentosa Ref: ITIS 30562 as of August 26, 2005... Pacific Ocean Areas was a major Allied military command during World War II. It was one of four major commands during the Pacific War, and one of two United States commands in the Pacific theatre of operations. ... German soldiers at the Battle of Stalingrad World War II was the most extensive and costly armed conflict in the history of the world, involving the great majority of the worlds nations, being fought simultaneously in several major theatres, and costing tens of millions of lives. ... Wake Forest University is a private university in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, known for its programs in the liberal arts. ... The University of California, Berkeley (also known as the University of California at Berkeley, UC Berkeley, Cal, California, or Berkeley) is the oldest and flagship campus of the ten-campus University of California system. ... An aerial view of the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse (before its relocation in 1999) Cape Hatteras from space, October 1989 Cape Hatteras is a cape on the coast of North Carolina. ... Official language(s) None, English de facto Capital Trenton Largest city Newark Area  Ranked 47th  - Total 8,729 sq mi (22,608 km²)  - Width 70 miles (110 km)  - Length 150 miles (240 km)  - % water 14. ... This is about the university. ...

Works

Ammons published Ommateum with Doxology, his first book, in 1955. In 1964, he joined the English faculty at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY, and published his second collection. His Collected Poems 1951-1971 (1972), won the National Book Award in 1973. Ammons is a maverick talent, utterly distinctive in voice, marked by high poetic ambition yet capable of whimsy. A nature poet, with a highly developed scientific acumen that sets him off from his contemporaries, Ammons often seems intent on making the consciousness of the poet the secret or real subject of the poem. In many cases, meticulous observation of the natural world is put at the service of abstract investigations and themes, such as the question of the one and the many; Ammons is constantly on the search for a unifying principle among minute and divergent particulars. The critic Harold Bloom has championed Ammons as a transcendentalist, 'the most direct Emersonian in American poetry since Frost'. This is about the university. ... The National Book Award is one of the most important literary prizes in the United States, presented annually for the best books by living U.S. citizens published in the U.S. The awards have been presented since 1950 in at least one category, and are presently awarded in each... A critic (from Greek κριτικός, kritikós - one who discerns, from Ancient Greek κριτής, krités, a judge) is a person who offers reasoned judgement or analysis, value judgement, interpretation, or observation. ... Harold Bloom, Literary Critic Dr. Harold Bloom (born July 11, 1930) is an American professor and prominent literary and cultural critic. ... Transcendentalism was the name of a group of new ideas in literature, religion, culture and philosophy which emerged in New England in the early- to mid-nineteenth century. ...

Among long poems, Tape for the Turn of the Year (1965) is a notable experiment in form. The poem's skinny lines are the result of Ammons's decision to type out the poem, without revision, on a long roll of adding-machine paper. The buoyant and discursive Sphere (1974), considered by some Ammons's masterpiece, displays his formal and prosodic originality. Consisting of 155 sections, each containing four three-line stanzas, Sphere enacts 'the form of a motion' (the book's subtitle). The colon is used as an all-purpose punctuation mark, with the effect that closure is continually postponed. The three-line stanzas resemble a species of terza libre—a rhymeless version of the stanza unit of Shelley's 'Ode to the West Wind'. Ammons writes in an American idiom, has a 'democratic' bias in favor of lower-case letters, and switches rapidly from high to low diction.

In 1987, Ammons became a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. 1987 (MCMLXXXVII) was a common year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar. ... The Fellowship of Southern Writers is a literary organization headquartered at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. ...

Bibliography

Poetry

• A Coast of Trees (1981)
• Briefings: Poems Small and Easy (1971)
• Brink Road (1996)
• Collected Poems: 1951-1971 (1972)
• Corsons Inlet (1965)
• Diversifications (1975)
• Expressions of Sea Level (1964)
• Garbage (1993)
• Glare (1997)
• Highgate Road (1977)
• Lake Effect Country (1983)
• Northfield Poems (1966)
• Ommateum, with Doxology (1955)
• Selected Longer Poems (1980)
• Selected Poems (1968)
• Sphere: The Form of a Motion (1974)
• Sumerian Vistas (1987)
• Tape for the Turn of the Year (1965)
• The North Carolina Poems (1994)
• The Really Short Poems (1991)
• The Selected Poems: 1951-1977 (1977)
• The Selected Poems: Expanded Edition (1986)
• The Snow Poems (1977)
• Uplands (1970)
• Worldly Hopes (1982)

Prose

• Set in Motion: Essays, Interviews, and Dialogues (1996)

Secondary Sources

• Harold Bloom, The Ringers in the Tower: Studies in Romantic Tradition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971.

• Diacritics 3 (1973). An entire "essays on Ammons" issue.

Harold Bloom, Literary Critic Dr. Harold Bloom (born July 11, 1930) is an American professor and prominent literary and cultural critic. ...

External links

• A.R. Ammons Interviewed by David Grossvogel
• Biography from the Arts and Education Council
• Review of an Ammons poem
• A.R. Ammons Poetry and Translations at the Open Translation Project sponsored by Bryant H. McGill
• Diacritics