Theology for Atheists: Reading Ammons

Abstract

To have come to A.R. Ammons's poetry in the mid-1970s, when the atmosphere was filled with personalities (Plath, Jong, Berryman) and relentlessly personal verse, was to notice what it lacked. In place of the confessional autobiographies that Plath and Lowell gave their audience and despite Plath's outraged feminism it was really the same audience of mandarin taste and educated preference Ammons supplied little more than serial observations of the natural world. There were no high-blown hymns to psychosis, no searing recollections of childhood, no show-stopping performances like Daddy or Walking in the Blue, no deep images, and little urban realism or political sentiment. Some typical Modernist gestures were there such as the lines of Poundian length, though in Ammons's case lacking any specific musical referent, an occasional reliance on vaguely mythical personae (So I said I am Ezra) and a prosody that walked the eye down the page. But the work contained elements un(we would now say anti-) Modernist in the extreme, such as a tendency to personify abstractions and to position the narrative, speaking self' in a self-deprecating light on those occasions when, as in A Tape for the Turn of the Year, he imposes on himself limits he could not find in tradition.' It came almost as a relief when in the late Sixties, and in the wake of books by R.W.B. Lewis and other apologists for Romanticism, Harold Bloom rescued Ammons from the Eliot-Pound axis and claimed him for Whitman-Crane-Stevens and canceled the possibility that the of the Ezra Poems was the one who had languished up until 1958 in a Washington mental hospital.