Quote

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 'Poetry is the linguistic correction of disorder.'

A. R. Ammons

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

A. R. Ammons
Age: 75 †
Born: 1926
Born: February 18
Died: 2001
Died: February 26
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
Whiteville
North Carolina
A.R. Ammons
A R Ammons
AR Ammons
Expect
Answer
Poetry
Linguistics
Question
Linguistic
Answers
Correction
Asks
Corrections
Words
Vague
Music
Disorder

More quotes by A. R. Ammons

Image
Things go away to return, brightened for the passage
A. R. Ammons
Image
The white sun like a moth on a string circles the southpole.
A. R. Ammons
Image
If a poem is each time new, then it is necessarily an act of discovery, a chance taken, a chance that may lead to fulfillment or disaster
A. R. Ammons
Image
I am grateful for - though I can't keep up with - the flood of articles, theses, and textbooks that mean to share insight concerning the nature of poetry.
A. R. Ammons
Image
For though we often need to be restored to the small, concrete, limited, and certain, we as often need to be reminded of the large, vague, unlimited, unknown
A. R. Ammons
Image
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.
A. R. Ammons
Image
A poem generated by its own laws may be unrealized and bad in terms of so-called objective principles of taste, judgement, deduction.
A. R. Ammons
Image
Probably all the attention to poetry results in some value, though the attention is more often directed to lesser than to greater values
A. R. Ammons
Image
Though I have looked everywhere / I can find nothing lowly / in the universe.
A. R. Ammons
Image
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 internal.
A. R. Ammons
Image
Is it not careless to become too local when there are four hundred billion stars in our galaxy alone.
A. R. Ammons
Image
One can't have it both ways and both ways is the only way I want it.
A. R. Ammons
Image
Attend to mushrooms and all other things will answer up.
A. R. Ammons
Image
Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.
A. R. Ammons
Image
Besides the actual reading in class of many poems, I would suggest you do two things: first, while teaching everything you can and keeping free of it, teach that poetry is a mode of discourse that differs from logical exposition
A. R. Ammons
Image
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 we discern the savage afflictions that turn us around: where but in the arrangements love crawls us through
A. R. Ammons
Image
To be saved is here, local and mortal
A. R. Ammons
Image
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 assurance.
A. R. Ammons
Image
In nature there are few sharp lines
A. R. Ammons
Image
Each poem in becoming generates the laws by which it is generated: extensions of the laws to other poems never completely take.
A. R. Ammons