The Common Life: A. R. Ammons and Pastoral

Abstract

This thesis proposes the pastoral as a useful frame for understanding the poems of A. R. Ammons. The connection I want to draw is not the one that might be expected: namely, that Ammons is a pastoral poet in the sense that his poems deal with nature rather than with the urban world. Instead, I follow Paul Alpers and William Empson and approach pastoral as a matter of poetic self-understanding and self-representation. The centrality to the mode of the figure of the singing shepherd indicates that what is often at issue in pastorals is a meditation on literature itself. Imagining the poet as shepherd, writers in this mode affirm an idea of poetry as engaged in the cultivation of forms of cultural, moral, or spiritual value—but locate this capacity, not in acts of powerful or original self-enunciation, but in continuing process or effort. I argue that such a concept of the poetic echoes that to be found in Ammons’s poems: proceeding from an ontology of temporality—or, as he calls it, “motion”—Ammons likewise hopes that poetry might foster forms of value or moments of insight, but finds these to be the achievements of temporal action or practice. I present as an important register of this mutuality of interests Ammons’s recourse to what he calls “the common life”, a phrase that speaks at once to an idea of the fundamental ordinariness of the poet; to a notion of the immediacy of poetic truth or value; and to a concept of temporal repetition or dailiness. The thesis has two parts. I begin by addressing what I take to be the commanding theme of Ammons’s work, an idea of motion, and propose that the key imperative of many of his poems is that of finding an appropriate stance relative to constant flux. Pastoral, too, reflects upon this question, and in the second half of Part One I provide an outline of my understanding of the pastoral mode. In Part Two, I locate Ammons’s work with reference to a line in American letters—including such writers as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau—that, insofar as it makes use of an idea of the writer as ordinary, may be considered a latter-day “version of pastoral” (as Empson would have it). Focusing on a tendency—shared by Thoreau, Frost, and Ammons—to present poetic enterprises as forms of labour, I examine Ammons’s rendering of poetic truth and poetic value as products of continuing effort. I then return to the concept of temporality with which I began, and consider Ammons’s development of an “everyday” approach to poetics—a notion of writing as a daily practice.