A.R. Ammons; Poet of Man and Nature

A.R. Ammons, a major American poet whose works contemplating the relationship of man and nature have been compared to those of Emerson, Whitman and William Carlos Williams, died of cancer Sunday at his home in Ithaca, N.Y. He was 75.

Ammons began writing verse while serving on a Navy destroyer in the South Pacific during World War II and in the following decades won most of the major prizes for poetry offered in the United States. He had taught at Cornell University since 1964.

The Ammons voice is one of the most distinctive, if somewhat understated, in modern American poetry as he viewed nature with optimism, curiosity, openness and a wry wit.

At a time when American poetry was heavily influenced by the challenging, often-angry poetry of the Beat Generation and the experimental poems of the Black Mountain School, Ammons harked back to an older strain of American nature poetry.

Ammons’ poetry has been linked to the 19th-century Transcendentalists and their concern with finding the “oneness” between man and his environment.

“An Ammons’ poem is the poet trying to make sense of the natural world around him,” said Marjorie Perloff, professor emeritus of English literature at Stanford. “There is usually no one else in the poem but the poet, there is nothing political or experimental, but the lines are so exquisite, so simple.”

Ammons’ lines were often short, epigrammatical and unfreighted by complex allusions. He preferred to surprise rather than shock, prod into thought rather than preach.

David Matlin, a novelist and associate professor of English at San Diego State, said Ammons, compared to the Beats or Black Mountain poets, “preferred a poetry that came out of direct experience: what could be immediately seen, felt and heard.”

In his poem, “Corsons Inlet,” a walk along the shore becomes a riff on the wonderful shagginess of the untamed environment:

in nature there are few sharp lines: there are areas of

primrose

more or less dispersed;

disorderly orders of bayberry; between the rows

of dunes,

irregular swamps of reeds,

though not reeds alone, but grass, bayberry, yarrow, all...

predominately reeds:

I have reached no conclusions, have erected no boundaries,

shutting out and shutting in, separating inside

from outside: I have

drawn no lines.

Ammons’ occasional satire was pointed but never cranky, as in his book-length “Garbage” in which he posed as a kind of poetic anthropologist examining American trash, which he called “the poem of our time.”

In some of his poems, he melded science and metaphysics, references to lasers and the perfection of a layup by basketball star Larry Bird. His work was sometimes brooding but never gloomy, always trying to find a connection between “the cell and the cosmos.”

Ammons’ poetry was championed by one of the lions of modern American literary criticism: Harold Bloom of Yale, who said that no other American poet is likelier to be a classic than Ammons.

“Whether he started at the local farmer’s market or with a vision of the end of civilization, he was able to build poems of philosophical complexity and depth from the clearest everyday language,” said poet Susan Stewart.

Archibald Randolph Ammons was born on a farm in Whiteville, N.C., coming of age during the economic devastation wrought on the Southern farm economy by the Depression. He once said that because he had seen the ravages of poverty, he could not understand the outrage that some poets, particularly those of the Beat Generation, aimed at the supposed sins of a prosperous postwar America.

After serving in the Navy, he attended Wake Forest College on the G.I. Bill, received a bachelor’s degree in science in 1949 and then studied literature at UC Berkeley.

Before coming to Cornell, he worked as a school principal, a real estate salesman, an editor and an executive with his father-in-law’s glass manufacturing company.

From those experiences, he gathered a respect for the life of ordinary Americans and, even late in life after being lavishly praised by critics, he declined to see himself as a literary figure.

Ammons once told a newspaper reporter, “I never dreamed of being a Poet poet. I think I always wanted to be an amateur poet.”

A preferred poetic pose was the poet humbled in the face of nature and unwilling to be overly rhapsodic or intellectual. He preferred the poetic dictum “no ideas except in things.” In “Gravelly Run,” he wrote:

no use to make any philosophies here:

I see no

god in the holly, hear no song from

the snowbroken weeds: Hegel is not the winter

yellow in the pines: the sunlight has never

heard of trees: surrendered self among

unwelcoming forms: stranger,

hoist your burdens, get on down the road.

Among his prizes, Ammons won National Book Awards for “Collected Poems: 1951-1971” and “Garbage,” the National Book Critics Award for “A Coast of Trees,” a MacArthur grant and the $100,000 Tanning Prize for “outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry.”

He is survived by his wife, Phyllis, a son, John, and two grandchildren.