Search Results

“... quack on with a terrible monotony and no pause for the opposite number to get in a word.’ A.R. Ammons’s poetry is a case in point: his massive oeuvre amounts to a kind of giant bulk bin fed by his extraordinary brush-equipped pick-up belt of a brain, which has managed to load and deliver material at a speed of about one collection every two years for ...”

“... Well,​ Mr Ammons, it looks as if you really have something here.’ On receiving this verdict from the poet Josephine Miles in 1951, the young Ammons was taken aback: he’d expected ‘bad news’. Yet whatever the something was that Mr Ammons had, it remained hidden from view for some time ...”

“... to polish a group of them with her calm, uncreased prose – John Ashbery, James Merrill, A.R. Ammons, Amy Clampitt, Charles Simic, Dave Smith, Seamus Heaney, Louise Glück, Jorie Graham and Rita Dove. Vendler is in love with the lyric, indeed so in love with it that she befriends strangers who appear to resemble it: in her collection of ...”

“... wife, Penelope, who was doing a graduate degree there in environmental landscape design. A.R. Ammons, for many years the éminence grise at the school, asked me to visit his office the following morning. He invited Creeley too. Two of America’s finest and most celebrated poets were making quite a fuss over my reading and I was swiftly ascending towards ...”

“... Mailer remembered Goodman as a ‘tall powerful handsome dark-haired young man with a profound air of defeated gloom’. Levertov was ‘a charming and most attractive dark-haired English girl with a characteristic space between her front teeth … Everyone in Paris liked her. She was pure as a bird, delicate yet firm in conscience.’ Levertov thought ...”

“... does not achieve the standard of wit in Merrill (‘Self-Portrait in Tyvek Windbreaker’) or A.R. Ammons (‘There! The Light of Human Reason!’). There are moments in Doty’s poems that make me wince. In Heaven’s Coast, he eloquently praises Whitman’s startling description of grass – ‘And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of ...”

“... daylight, clarity and emptiness is not prima facie implausible (think of the lines by A.R. Ammons: ‘The noon sun casts/mesh refractions/on the stream’s amber/bottom/and nothing at all gets,/nothing gets/caught at all’) – yet the attributes of a grid are only sufficient for such an association, not necessary. We could think of a grid quite ...”

“... a range of particularly well-chosen lyric poems, from Sappho and Goethe to A.A. Milne and A.R. Ammons, in order to establish its claims. The book also displays Culler’s heritage. He positions himself (at times slightly in the spirit of a cold warrior of the theory wars) against two orthodoxies. On his right flank is the New Critical tendency to treat ...”

“... poetic,’ Vendler limits the development of ‘poetry’ (steadily elided with ‘lyric’) to a re-negotiation of the self’s relationship with shifting ‘reality’. Because she is interested in the nature of renegotiation rather than in the terms arrived at, she is a more literate critic than Bloom. But the same impulse makes her overvalue texts in ...”

“... not one of his more successful works – prose poems are not his forte – has the rather passé air which is both deft and comfortable in his best poetry but somehow not right in prose. You know that emptiness that was the only way you could express a thing? The awkwardness around what were necessary topics of discussion, amounting to total silence on all ...”

“... It may owe something also to the rational, non-frenetic American school of poets like A.R. Ammons. It has highly respectable, indeed Coleridgean, antecedents – and Coleridge himself admired and copied Cowper’s ‘divine chit-chat’ – but modern fashion is closer to the mild rambling poems of the Georgian anthology: poets wearing their social ...”