"How Are We to Find Holiness?": The Religious Vision of A. R. Ammons

Abstract

Critical attention to the religious element in the poetry of A. R. has generally subsumed it in an overall argument placing him as modern Romantic visionary poet. Locating in this way has obscured somewhat the extent of his spirituality and its unique emotional tonality. A reading of sensitive to these may find in his development spiritual pilgrimage with distinct phases. His idea of God, clearly present in the early poetry, undergoes period of doubt, reconstruction, and denial in the middle of his career, and after strong negation becomes renewed theme in his later poetry. Meditation on the nature of and interrogation of the visible world for revelation of the Divine occasion some of his most powerful writing. Marius Bewley in an early review first pointed out that is mystical poet in the same sense that Whitman (713). Somewhat later, Hyatt Waggoner discerned that a sense of God's reality, whether as immanent or as deus absconditus, is everywhere present in the poems and should be recognized. . . . is poet of religious (Notes 70), view to which he has held true in subsequent assessments of Ammons's career, although he stresses skeptical as well for whom religious beliefs are like mirages, existing somewhere between fact and delusion (American Poets 617). Helen Vendler has identified one of his greatest poems as a colloquy with God (Music 338), yet elsewhere she qualifies as manifesting no more than belief in Quakerish inner light, and certifies his work as being happily free of disabling religious or ideological nostalgia (Veracity 104, 101).(1) Vendler's uneasiness with Ammons's religiosity, even as her critical acuity registers its existence, indicates the difficulty others have had acknowledging it. The age wants to celebrate the poet, but is uncomfortable with the spiritual commitments that animate his work. Ammons's belief in God's presence in the universe does not arise from allegiance to particular institutional mode of revelation; in fact, while his early work can be quite overtly Christian, his later work includes elements of eastern religion. Furthermore, as both mystic and inheritor of the Williams branch of modernist tradition, he operates under Pound's injunction to make it new, to perceive and to articulate that knowledge without reference to institutions and sacred texts. Yet however syncretic or idiosyncratic his synthesis, there seems little doubt that Ammons, rather than showing characteristic concepts and patterns of Romantic philosophy and literature of displaced and reconstituted theology or . . . secularized form of devotional experience (Abrams 65), instead shows return to mystical devotion and meditation on the works and mind of God. In the criticism of Ammons's work the religious has often been elided into the philosophical or psychological. Favoring the latter was Harold Bloom, who during the period of his own greatest influence was one of the first to champion Ammons. He applied reading which relentlessly psychologizes the poet's work. is Romantic seer whose achievement is the result of creative will to power, continuously threatened by the universe's recalcitrance, and by the poet's awareness of the limits of his own mind. Bloom, like Waggoner, places in visionary company of Strong Romantic Sensibilities, an avatar of his American predecessor Emerson. While philosophical similarities between and Emerson have been often noted, Bloom makes it an issue of filiation and treats the tensions in that relationship as the actual matter of the poetry. Bloom invites us to admire the heroic struggle of doomed subjectivity to establish its vision for time, struggle with the very fact of vision itself, project in which a poem is . . . as much an act of breaking as of making, as much blinding as seeing (A. R. Ammons 156). …