A. R. Ammons

The disciplines of poetry and painting frequently intersect, and artists as famed as Michelangelo were accomplished in both. In more recent times, Archie Randolph Ammons (1926–2001), better known for his poetry than his painting, was concerned with nature, science, religion, and philosophy. A colleague in the English Department at Cornell University, Roger Gilbert, succinctly described Ammons’s paradoxical qualities “as a solitary man who craved companionship, a visionary wedded to the here and now, a poet in love with music and painting, a teacher suspicious of didacticism, a Southerner who spent most of his life in the North, a transcendentalist transfixed by science, an atheist who never lost his religious feeling. Perhaps the central contradiction in Ammons’s character was between intensity and ordinariness.” [1]

Ammons was born near Whiteville in Columbus County, North Carolina, on land his family had farmed for generations. Raised during the Depression years, he was the only surviving of three sons. He recalled that his main exposure to literature consisted of Sunday school hymns and Bible verses. His high school English teachers were the first to recognize his talent. In 1944, Ammons joined the United States Naval Reserve and served a year aboard a destroyer in the South Pacific, where he came across a poetry anthology and began his first attempts at writing.

Upon his discharge from the navy in 1946, Ammons enrolled at Wake Forest College in Wake Forest, North Carolina. There he studied biology and took intermediate Spanish from his future wife, Phyllis Plumbo. Three years later, he graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in General Science with a minor in English. The following year, he served as principal and one of three teachers for the Cape Hatteras School on the North Carolina coast. On his wife’s recommendation, Ammons then moved to California to continue his studies at the University of California at Berkeley, finishing his undergraduate degree in English as well as some graduate level study.

Ammons moved from California to New Jersey in 1952 to work, where he worked for his father-in-law’s biological glassware supply company, Friederich & Dimmonch, Inc. He continued to write poetry and published his first book of poetry, Onmateum in 1955, but it attracted little success in sales or attention. He did meet other poets while living in southern New Jersey, notably William Carlos Williams. In 1964, Ammons’s second collection, Expressions of Sea Level, was issued by the Ohio State University Press. It established him as a major new voice in American poetry. A year before, he was invited to Ithaca, New York, for a poetry reading at Cornell University, and the following year was hired as an Assistant Professor in the English Department. Despite his lack of a doctoral degree, he was granted tenure. Ammons remained at Cornell, becoming the Goldwin Smith Professor and, upon his retirement in 1998, professor emeritus.

Among his numerous awards and honors, Ammons twice won the National Book Award for Poetry—first in 1973 for Collected Poems, and again in 1993 for Garbage. In 1978 he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He won the Bollingen Prize for Poetry in 1975, a MacArthur Fellowship in 1981, and the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets in 1998. He was a recipient of 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.

Ammons returned often to North Carolina to visit his sister as well as his alma mater, which had relocated to Winston-Salem in the mid-1950s. He was awarded an honorary degree by Wake Forest University in 1972, and was Poet-in-Residence there from 1974 to 1975. In November 2010, Wake Forest University hosted “Single Threads Unbraided,” an Ammons symposium sponsored by the Z. Smith Reynolds Library with support from the North Carolina Council for the Arts. Noted literary critic Helen Vendler, Harvard University’s A. Kingsley Porter University Professor, was the keynote speaker. The two-day event included talks by colleagues from Cornell and elsewhere, an exhibition of Ammons’s watercolors, and a dramatic reading of letters to his wife.

Notes:

[1] Roger Gilbert, ed. “This is Just a Place: The Life and Work of A. R. Ammons,” Epoch 52, no. 3 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, 2004): 262-265.