A. R. Ammons Quotes

37 quotes in 561 categories

• I must stress here the point that I appreciate clarity, order, meaning, structure, rationality: they are necessary to whatever provisional stability we have, and they…
• Is it not careless to become too local when there are four hundred billion stars in our galaxy alone.
• Anything looked at closely becomes wonderful.
• The poet exposes himself to the risk. All that has been said about poetry, all that he has learned about poetry, is only a partial…
• A poem generated by its own laws may be unrealized and bad in terms of so-called objective principles of taste, judgement, deduction.
• Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.
• Each poem in becoming generates the laws by which it is generated: extensions of the laws to other poems never completely take.
• I take the walk to be the externalization of an interior seeking so that the analogy is first of all between the external and the…
• Poetry leads us to the unstructured sources of our beings, to the unknown, and returns us to our rational, structured selves refreshed.
• There's something to be said in favor of working in isolation in the real world.
• I can't tell you where a poem comes from, what it is, or what it is for: nor can any other man. The reason I…
• Even if you walk exactly the same route each time - as with a sonnet - the events along the route cannot be imagined to…
• I am grateful for - though I can't keep up with - the flood of articles, theses, and textbooks that mean to share insight concerning…
• If we ask a vague question, such as, 'What is poetry?' we expect a vague answer, such as, 'Poetry is the music of words,' or…
• You have your identity when you find out, not what you can keep your mind ON, but what you can't keep your mind OFF.
• Everything is discursive opinion instead of direct experience.
• To be saved is here, local and mortal
• Where but in the very asshole of comedown is redemption: as where but brought low, where but in the grief of failure, loss, error do…
• Poetry leads us to the unstructured sources of our beings, to the unknown, and returns us to our rational, structured selves refreshed. Having once experienced…
• If the greatest god is the stillness all the motions add up to, then we must ineluctably be included.

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