These poems are, for the most part, dramatic presentations of thought and emotion, as in themes of the fear of the loss of identity, the appreciation of transient natural beauty, the conflict between the individual and the group, the chaotic particle in the classical field, the creation of false gods to serve real human needs. While maintaining a perspective from the hub, the poet ventures out in each poem to explore one of the numberless radii of experience. The poems suggest a many-sided view of reality; an adoption of tentative, provisional attitudes, replacing the partial, unified, prejudicial, and rigid; a belief that forms of thought, like physical forms, are, in so far as they resist it, susceptible to change, increasingly costly and violent.
In manner the poems are terse and evocative. They suggest and imply and rather grow in the reader’s mind than exhaust themselves in completed, external form. The imagery is generally functional beyond pictoral evocation of mood, as plateau, for example, may suggest a flat, human existence, devoid of the drama of rising and falling.
These poems, then, mean to enrich the experience of being; of being anterior to action, that shapes action; of being anterior to wider, richer being.
From A. R. Ammons, Ommateum with Doxology (Philadelphia: Dorrance, 1955).