Archie Randolph Ammons was born on February 18, 1926, on his family’s small farm near Whiteville and later moved to Chadburn. It was a hardscrabble life and growing up in the country during the Great Depression gave him, as one critic observed, "not only an intimate acquaintance with nature but also a keen sense of the precarious nature of existence." His early years on a tobacco and cotton farm provided the pastoral setting for some of his most memorable work, as well as the inspiration for poems about mules, hog-killings, hunting, and farmlands.

Ammons started writing poetry during the long hours aboard a Navy destroyer escort in the South Pacific. After World War II, he attended Wake Forest University, where his interest in science would influence the unique diction of his poetical style. After a few months of graduate school, he became principal of Hatteras Elementary School and absorbed the sights and sounds of the Outer Banks for a year. He also worked jobs as a real estate salesman, an editor, and an executive in a glass manufacturing firm before he began teaching at Cornell University in 1964.

Ammons has been described as a major American poet in the tradition of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman. Generally opting for free forms, he has been concerned with man’s relationship to nature, the problems of identity, permanence and change, and the processes of nature. His whimsically formatted Tape for the Turn of the Year was originally written on a roll of adding machine tape in the form of a journal covering the period December 6, 1963, to January 10, 1964. Many think his Expressions at Sea Level, Corsons Inlet: A Book of Poems among his best work.

A two-time winner of the National Book Award, plus the Bollingen Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, Ammons published nearly thirty volumes of poetry, including Glare (1997), Garbage (1993), A Coast of Trees (1981), Sphere (1974), and Collected Poems 1951-1971 (1972). His many honors included the American Academy of American Poets’ 1998 Tanning Prize, the Poetry Society of America’s Robert Frost Medal and the Ruth Lilly Prize, as well as fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

His last book, Glare, was praised for its "riveting, iconoclastic freshness" by the judges who awarded him the $100,000 Tanning Prize. Despite his many accomplishments, upon learning of this singular Academy honor, Ammons cast his mind back to his early years as a struggling poet. "I greatly appreciate the recognition," he told an interviewer. "It rings back to the earliest days when there was no recognition or support—and it means a lot to hear those bells." The poet lived with his wife, Phyllis, in Ithaca, New York, where he was Goldwin Smith Professor Emeritus of Poetry at Cornell.

When I Was Young the Silk
from The North Carolina Poems
Edited by Alex Albright,
N.C. Wesleyan College Press, 1994

When I was young the silk of my mind hard as a peony head unfurled and wind bloomed the parachute: The air-head tugged me up, tore my roots loose and drove high, so high I want to touch down now and taste the ground I want to take in my silk and ask where I am before it is too late to know

Small Song
from Collected Poems: 1951-1971
W.W. Norton, 1972
reprinted by permission of Arlene Phalon, W.W. Norton & Co., Inc.

The reeds give way to the wind and give the wind away

Crowride
from The Really Short Poems of A.R. Ammons
W.W. Norton, 1990
reprinted by permission of Arlene Phalon, W.W. Norton & Co., Inc.

When the crow lands, the tip of the sprung spruce bough weighs so low, the system so friction-free, the bobbing lasts way past any interest in the subject.

Mule Song
from Collected Poems: 1951-1971
W.W. Norton, 1972
reprinted by permission of Arlene Phalon, W.W. Norton & Co., Inc.

Silver will lie where she lies sun-out, whatever turning the world does, longeared in her ashen, earless, floating world: indifferent to sores and greengage colic, where oats need not come to, bleached by crystals of her trembling time: beyond all brunt of seasons, blind forever to all blinds, inhabited by brooks still she may wraith over broken fields after winter or roll in the rye-green fields: old mule, no defense but a mule’s against disease, large-ribbed, flat-toothed, sold to a stranger, shot by a stranger’s hand, not my hand she nuzzled the seasoning-salt from.

Easter Morning
from The North Carolina Poems
edited by Alex Albright
N.C. Wesleyan College Press, 1994

I have a life that did not become, that turned aside and stopped, astonished: I hold it in me like a pregnancy or as on my lap a child not to grow old but dwell on it is to his grave I most frequently return and return to ask what is wrong, what was wrong, to see it all by the light of a different necessity but the grave will not heal and the child, stirring, must share my grave with me, an old man having gotten by on what was left when I go back to my home country in these fresh far-away days, it’s convenient to visit everybody, aunts and uncles, those who used to say, look how he’s shooting up, and the trinket aunts who always had a little something in their pocketbooks, cinnamon bark or a penny or nickel, and uncles who were the rumored fathers of cousins who whispered of them as of great, if troubled, presences, and school teachers, just about everybody older (and some younger) collected in one place waiting, particularly, but not for me, mother and father there, too, and others close, close as burrowing under skin, all in the graveyard assembled, done for, the world they used to wield, have trouble and joy in, gone the child in me that could not become was not ready for others to go, to go on into change, blessings and horrors, but stands there by the road where the mishap occurred, crying out for help, come and fix this or we can’t get by, but the great ones who were to return, they could not or did not hear and went on in a flurry and now, I say in the graveyard, here lies the flurry, now it can’t come back with help or helpful asides, now we all buy the bitter incompletions, pick up the knots of horror, silently raving, and go on crashing into empty ends not completions, not rondures the fullness has come into and spent itself from I stand on the stump of a child, whether myself or my little brother who died, and yell as far as I can, I cannot leave this place, for for me it is the dearest and the worst, it is life nearest to life which is life lost: it is my place where I must stand and fail, calling attention with tears to the branches not lofting boughs into space, to the barren air that holds the world that was my world though the incompletions (& completions) burn out standing in the flash high-burn momentary structure of ash, still it is a picture-book, letter-perfect Easter morning: I have been for a walk: the wind is tranquil: the brook works without flashing in an abundant tranquility: the birds are lively with voice: I saw something I had never seen before: two great birds, maybe eagles, blackwinged, whitenecked and –headed, came from the south oaring the great wings steadily; they went directly over me, high up, and kept on due north: but then one bird, the one behind, veered a little to the left and the other bird kept on seeming not to notice for a minute: the first began to circle as if looking for something, coasting, resting its wings on the down side of some of the circles: the other bird came back and they both circled, looking perhaps for a draft; they turned a few more times, possibly rising—at least, clearly resting— then flew on falling into distance till they broke across the local bush and trees: it was a sight of bountiful majesty and integrity: the having patterns and routes, breaking from them to explore other patterns or better ways to routes, and then the return: a dance sacred as the sap in the trees, permanent in its descriptions as the ripples round the brook’s ripplestone: fresh as this particular flood of burn breaking across us now from the sun.

Books (partial listing)

Briefings: Poems Small and Easy. New York: W. W. Norton, 1971.

Brink Road. New York: W. W. Norton, 1996.

A Coast of Trees. New York: W. W. Norton, 1981.

Collected Poems, 1951-1971. New York: W. W. Norton, 1972.

Corsons Inlet: A Book of Poems. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1965.

Diversifications. New York: W. W. Norton, 1975.

Expressions of Sea Level. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1964.

Garbage. New York: W. W. Norton, 1993.

Glare. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997.

Lake Effect Country. New York: W. W. Norton, 1983.

The North Carolina Poems. Edited by Alex Albright. Rocky Mount: North Carolina Wesleyan College Press, 1994.

Northfield Poems. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1966.

Ommateum, with Doxology. Philadelphia, Pa.: Dorrance, 1955.

The Really Short Poems of A. R. Ammons. New York: W. W. Norton, 1990.

Selected Longer Poems. New York: W. W. Norton, 1980.

Selected Poems. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1968.

The Selected Poems. New York: W. W. Norton, 1986.

Set In Motion: Essays, Interviews, and Dialogues. Edited by Zofia Burr. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996.

The Selected Poems, 1951-1977. New York: W. W. Norton, 1977.

The Snow Poems. New York: W. W. Norton, 1977.

Sphere: The Form of a Motion. New York: W. W. Norton, 1974.

Sumerian Vistas. New York: W. W. Norton, 1987.

Tape for the Turn of the Year. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1965.

Uplands: New Poems. New York: W. W. Norton, 1970.

Worldly Hopes. New York: W. W. Norton, 1982.

Poetry by Mr. Ammons has appeared in numerous periodicals and chapbooks and as limited-issue broadsides.

Additional information on Mr. Ammons and his work can be found in:

Bartlett, Brian. "Speech and Address in the Poetry of A. R. Ammons." Ph.D. dissertation, University of Montreal, 1990.

Bloom, Harold, ed. A. R. Ammons. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1986.

Clark, Miriam M. "‘Not at All Surprised by Science’ : Science and Technology in Ammons, Nemerov, and Merrill." Ph.D dissertation, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1986.

Cliff, Joanne Elizabeth. "The Romantic Naturalist Strain in the Poetry of A. R. Ammons." Ph.D. dissertation, Queens University of Kingston (Canada), 1984.

DeRosa, Janet E. "Occurrences of Promise and Terror: The Poetry of A. R. Ammons." Ph.D. dissertation, Brown University, 1978.

Evans, J. Dennis. "The Book of Laws Founded against Itself: The Poetry of A. R. Ammons, 1951-1976." Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1978.

Evans, Murphy. "A Reading of A. R. Ammons’ Ommateum, with Doxology." Honors Essay, Curriculum in American Studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1984.

Fried, Philip H. "’A Place You Can Live’: An Interview with A. R. Ammons." Manhattan Review 1, no. 2 (Fall 1980): 1-28.

_____. "Three Essays on the Poetry of A. R. Ammons." Ph.D. dissertation, State University of New York at Stony Brook, 1978.

Hanse, Bertha A. "The Spiritual Eye of A. R. Ammons: Mystical Elements in Sphere: The Form of A Motion." Ph.D. dissertation, University of Arkansas, 1995.

Holder, Alan. A. R. Ammons. Boston, Mass.: Twayne Publishers, 1979.

Johnston, Sara Andrews. "Life’s a Beach: The Shore-Lyric from Arnold to Ammons." Ph.D. dissertation, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1991.

Kirschten, Robert, ed. Critical Essays on A. R. Ammons. New York: G. K. Hall, 1997.

McFee, Michael A. "Form in the Long Poems of A. R. Ammons." M.A. thesis, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1978.

Mills, Elizabeth M. "Wording the Unspeakable: Emily: Dickinson and A. R. Ammons." Ph.D. dissertation, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1985.

Schneider, Steven Paul. A. R. Ammons and the Poetics of Widening Scope. Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1994. 246 pp.

_____, ed. Complexities of Motion: New Essays on A. R. Ammons’ Long Poems. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1999.

Scigaj, Leonard M. Sustainable Poetry: Four American Ecopoets. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999.

Wilson, Matthew Thomas. "A. R. Ammons, Theodore Roethke, and American Nature Poetry." Ph.D. dissertation, Rutgers University, 1978.

Wolfe, Cary. "The Poetics of Nature: A. R. Ammons’ Later Long Poems." M.A. thesis, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1986.

Wright, Stuart T., comp. "A. R. Ammons: A Bibliographical Checklist." American Book Collector 1, no. 3 (May/June 1980): 32-37.

_____. A. R. Ammons: A Bibliography, 1954-1979. Winston-Salem, N.C.: Wake Forest University, 1980.