610
PAUL ZWEIG
brilliant quality, lapses into a compromise which is neither sensuous, nor
especially thoughtful either:
in nature there are few sharp lines: there are areas of
primrose
more
or
less dispersed;
disorderly orders of bayberry; between the
TOWS
of dunes,
irregular swamps of reeds,
though not reeds alone, but grass, bayberry, yarrow, all
. ..
pretIominantly reeds:
Academic critics like Harold Bloom and Geoffrey Hartman have been
partly responsible for the enlarged interest in Ammons's work.
Diacritics,
a
university magazine devoted to literary theory, recently published an entire
issue on Ammons. One is happy for this renewed interest on the part of the
academy for poets and for poetry. Bloom's and Hartman's enthusiasm for Am–
mons probably reflects their sense of a failure in the antirhetorical poetry of the
past decade. After years of a poetic style which militated against ideas and
repudiated conceptual ambition, they found in Ammons a poet both thought–
ful and complex, whose work invites the sort of critical scrutiny which the
great works of modernism also invited. Like Stevens, Pound, and Eliot, Am–
mons in his poetry demands explication. And let us be reminded, explication
is not simply a form of detached analysis.
It
is a mode of reading required by,
and appropriate to, complex poems. As practiced by the great critics of mod–
ernism-Blackrrrur, Empson-it becomes a form of intellectual ascesis, mobil–
izing the passions of thought in an activity akin to the methods of meditation
about which Louis Martz has written.
But these critics have done Ammons a curious disservice, for they have
focused their praise on his weakest quality-his attempt to formulate compli–
cated ideas in poetry-and overlooked what seems to me to be his real achieve–
ment: the lyrical articulation of small moments of experience; his ability to
organize shapes of language into an epiphany of movement, a frozen flood of
perceptions which is visionary not because of any passionate metaphysics, but
because of the sheer clarity of the poet's ability to recreate what he "sees." I
don't mean to say that Ammons doesn' t think well, or that his ideas are not
interesting. They are; more important, they provide a framework which re–
leases the intensity of his best short poems. But they do not make good poetry.
Unlike Eliot or Stevens, Ammons does not write well about ideas. His con–
ceptual reach does not intensify his language. When he writes "philosophi–
cal" poems, or inserts reflective passages into poems, he becomes boring and
abstract. Only when his poem plunges into the moment itself does it gain the
exhilarating clarity which is Ammons's best quality, as in this short poem,
"Winter Scene" :
