A. R. Ammons

Archie Randolph Ammons was born outside Whiteville, North Carolina, on February 18, 1926. He started writing poetry aboard a U.S. Navy destroyer escort in the South Pacific. After completing service in World War II, he attended Wake Forest University and the University of California, Berkeley.

Ammons published his first book of poems, Ommateum: With Doxology (Dorrance & Company), in 1955. He went on to publish nearly thirty collections, including Bosh and Flapdoodle (W. W. Norton, 2005); Glare (W. W. Norton, 1997); Garbage (W. W. Norton, 1993), which won both the National Book Award and Library of Congress’s Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry; A Coast of Trees (W. W. Norton, 1981), which received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry; Sphere: The Form of a Motion (W. W. Norton, 1974), which won the Bollingen Prize; and Collected Poems, 1951–1971 (W. W. Norton, 1972), which won the National Book Award.

The poet Richard Howard has said, “Ammons is our Lucretius, swerving and sideswiping his way into the nature of things, through domestic doldrums, cardinals and quince bushes, fields of sidereal force, out into what he so accurately calls ‘joy’s surviving radiance.’”

Ammons’s additional honors include the Academy’s Wallace Stevens Award, the Poetry Society of America’s Robert Frost Medal, the Ruth Lilly Prize, and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

During his early years, Ammons worked as an elementary school principal, a real estate salesman, an editor, and an executive in his father’s biological glass company before he began teaching at Cornell University in 1964. He was Goldwin Smith Professor of Poetry at Cornell until his retirement in 1998. He died in Ithaca, New York, on February 25, 2001.