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A. R. Ammons's Levity

Citation:

Kearful, Frank J. . 2011. “A. R. Ammons's Levity”. Partial Answers 9(1): 153-175. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/413973.
  • Frank Kearful

Date Published:

9 Jan, 2011

Abstract:

You can locate A. R. Ammons in a line of great walkers from Wordsworth to Frank O'Hara, but what makes him different from all the rest is that despite being so peripatetic, he could not keep his feet on the ground. In poem after poem he, or a stand-in protagonist, not only turns, spins, and whirls, but rises, ascends, levitates. Thereafter comes in due course a descent, sometimes an arduous or scarifying one, but which typically finds him the better off after his return to terra firma. Levity in the transferred sense - Ammons was a whimsical, voluble, unbuttoned humorist - proves useful in contending with the perilous consequences of his levitations. In addition to his drollery, Ammons sporadically employs a prophetic voice, meditates on philosophical issues, and delves expertly into phenomena privy to the natural scientist. The composite result is a style of levity entirely his own. The extent to which he may, as a consequence of his levity, or in spite of it, be enrolled in a transcendentalist tradition of the visionary sublime stretching back to Emerson, as Harold Bloom would have it, is debatable. Five poems examined very closely give a slant on the issues involved, "Moment," "Transcendence," "He Held Radical Light," "Levitation," and "Hymn." Other Ammons poems are discussed briefly, and incidental comparisons are made to poems by Walt Whitman, Wallace Stevens, Theodore Roethke, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, and John Ashbery.

 

Frank Kearful is Professor of English at Bonn University, where he has taught since 1974. He has been a visiting professor at Tübingen University and Hamburg University, and before moving to Germany in 1972 he was an Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Washington. He has written numerous articles on twentieth-century American poetry, is editor of The Robert Lowell Newsletter, and since 2003 he has written the annual chapter on American poetry since the 1940s for American Literary Scholarship.

 

Updated July 29, 2011

 

Publisher's Version

Last updated on 04/16/2020