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One can't have it both ways and both ways is the only way I want it.

A. R. Ammons

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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
Ways
Way

More quotes by A. R. Ammons

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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
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I have reached no conclusions, have erected no boundaries, shutting out and shutting in, separating inside from outside: I have drawn no lines
A. R. Ammons
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Poetry leads us to the unstructured sources of our beings, to the unknown, and returns us to our rational, structured selves refreshed.
A. R. Ammons
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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
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The wonderful workings of the world: wonderful, wonderful: I'm surprised half the time
A. R. Ammons
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If the greatest god is the stillness all the motions add up to, then we must ineluctably be included.
A. R. Ammons
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Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.
A. R. Ammons
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Is it not careless to become too local when there are four hundred billion stars in our galaxy alone.
A. R. Ammons
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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
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I have a life that did not become, that turned aside and stopped, astonished
A. R. Ammons
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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
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The walk liberating, I was released from forms, from the perpendiculars, straight lines, blocks, boxes, binds of thought into the hues, shadings, rises, flowing bends and blends of sight.
A. R. Ammons
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The white sun like a moth on a string circles the southpole.
A. R. Ammons
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In nature there are few sharp lines
A. R. Ammons
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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 can be the agents of gradual and successful change.
A. R. Ammons
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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
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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
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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
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Even if you walk exactly the same route each time - as with a sonnet - the events along the route cannot be imagined to be the same from day to day, as the poet's health, sight, his anticipations, moods, fears, thoughts cannot be the same.
A. R. Ammons
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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