PARTISAN REVIEW
609
and renders in language, the interpenetrating gusts of movement by which the
mind and the world make each other whole. As Ammons writes in "Corsons
Inlet":
I have reached no conclusions, have erected no boundaries,
shutting out and shutting in, separating inside
from outside:
I
have
drawn no lines:
as
manifold events of sand
change the dune's shape that will not be the same shape
tomorrow,
so I am willing to
go
along, to accept
the becoming
thought, to stake off no beginnings
or
ends, establish
no walls:
This is Ammons at his clearest, yet somehow not at his best. The statement he
makes is accurate enough: the aim of his poetry is not finishing, but unfinish–
ing; it is to cut the world loose from the illusion of settled forms, and set
it
flowing in the ever new flood of perception. His words cascade irregularly on
the page in a mimetism of released energy. The "idea" is there all right. But the
poetry is cold, the experience, for all its intricacy, is thin. And here is Ammons's
gravest fault. All too often he fails to connect the conceptual framework of the
poem with the local effects of his language. This is especially true in the early
work, but it remains true of his longer, more ambitious poems throughout. His
images turn moments of experience into sensuous complexities; Hopkins-like
compressions of syntax offer the reader "a hundred sensations a second," .as
Ammons remarks. But a gap yawns between this brilliant seething of impres–
sions and the overarching discourse which Ammons intends as his "idea of
order." Between sensuous mimetism and cold philosophy there is a space,
which Ammons does not fill often enough. But the space between is where we
live.
It
is where the "idea" thickens into passion, where passions clarify into
thought and perception. "Corsons Inlet" and "Saliences" are often cited as
examples of Ammons's conceptual power. We are invited by critics to think of
Wordsworth in "Tintern Abbey," of Emerson, of Eliot's discoursive passages in
"Four Quartets." But "Corsons Inlet" is governed by windy and abstract
rhetoric, as in the passage quoted above. The poem begins crisply enough, with
a description of the poet walking along a beachfront, exploring the uncertain
margin between land and sea, reflecting on the perpetual movement which
dissolves shapes through an alchemy of slow transitions, as the sand dune
simultaneously stands and and blows away, as the tide is a tireless alternation of
land and water. But the landscape is quickly dimmed by the fog of meaning
which Ammons projects upon it. Ammons's power of perception, his most