608
PAUL ZWEIG
be gatheringnow that he is not here
to
undermine it with the elaborate cunning
of his drunkenness and despair. Sylvia Plath has lasted remarkably long,
despite her sentimental partisans.
Meanwhile the table has been set again, and the guests are swarming.
Another good poet has been declared hopefully, tentatively, major. The poet is
A. R. Ammons, the occasion the publication last year of his
Collected Poems.
2
Ammons has written a great deal. Although his
Collected Poems
are not com–
plete-it leaves out a long poem, "Tape For the Turn of the Year, " published
several years ago as a separate volume-it represents almost four hundred
pages, and Ammons's career is young.
Collection is the opposite of selection and, in the case of poetry, it is rarely
to the poet's advantage. Few of us are Yeats or Baudelaire. In the past, most
collections were done after the poet's death by scholars seeking to establish a
historical document. But poets these days have taken to "collecting" them–
selves, and the result often blurs more than it clarifies the achievement of the
work. In his collection, Ammons includes every moment and modulation of
his talent: the luminous leafed in with the trivial, the carefully achieved with
the self-indulgent, the too long with the too short. One has to wade through a
great deal of tentative language before coming upon the fine sparse poems
which represent Ammons's best. But the labor is by no means all loss. The very
shagginess and roughness of the collection forces the reader to become in–
timate with Ammons's elusive rhythms. One has the experience not so much
of reading a work, as of entering into a process, in the course of which finished
poems emerge, like pure crystals, their stony husk refined away. There is pow–
er in all of this. The roughness and profusion of Ammons's work becomes,
somehow, a figure for his obsession; the sense of a process rushing brilliantly,
though inconclusively forward is, finally, true
to
the idea of his poetry. As a
result of sifting and panning all of this ore-a labor not without tedium-one
understands, finally, why Ammons's turn at the banquet table has come.
At a time when the limits of the conversational style have come to be felt
more and more strongly, Ammons offers, in great abundance, precisely those
qualities neglected during the 1960s: intricate language and conceptual ambi–
tion. Reading through many of his longer poems, one is impressed by Am–
mons's attempt to connect a density of style reminiscent of Gerard Manley
Hopkins, with an elaborate reflective framework which recalls Wallace
Stevens. The echo of Stevens is inevitable, since Ammons's main concern is
to
articulate a philosophy of perception which must be simultaneously argued
and demonstrated in the poetry. The main point of Ammons's conception
seems to be his view that the mind and the world are joined together in a
seamless intricacy.
It
is not simply that the mind and the world mirror each
other, for mirrors contain settled forms, they connect but they also interpose
limits. Like Alice, the poet has solved the surface of the mirror. He perceives,
2. Collected Poems
1951-1971 . By A. R. Ammons. Norton. $12.50.
