Words matter. These are the best A. R. Ammons Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Probably all the attention to poetry results in some value, though the attention is more often directed to lesser than to greater values.
Everything is discursive opinion instead of direct experience.
If the greatest god is the stillness all the motions add up to, then we must ineluctably be included.
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.
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.
Each poem in becoming generates the laws by which it is generated: extensions of the laws to other poems never completely take.
A poem generated by its own laws may be unrealized and bad in terms of so-called objective principles of taste, judgement, deduction.
Anything looked at closely becomes wonderful.
Once every five hundred years or so, a summary statement about poetry comes along that we can’t imagine ourselves living without.
Questions structure and, so, to some extent predetermine answers.
Only silence perfects silence.
That’s a wonderful change that’s taken place, and so most poetry today is published, if not directly by the person, certainly by the enterprise of the poet himself, working with his friends.
I can’t tell you where a poem comes from, what it is, or what it is for: nor can any other man. The reason I can’t tell you is that the purpose of a poem is to go past telling, to be recognised by burning.
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.
There’s something to be said in favor of working in isolation in the real world.
In nature there are few sharp lines.
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.
