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"A. R. Ammons." - Poets.org. N.p., n.d. Web. 31 May 2013.

"A. R. Ammons." : The Poetry Foundation. N.p., n.d. Web. 31 May 2013.

"A. R. Ammons' Life and Career." A. R. Ammons' Life and Career. N.p., n.d. Web. 31 May 2013. N.p., n.d. Web.

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"Gravelly Run" by A.R. Ammons, an ecopoem. Image from deviantArt by Scat_Cat. "Like" us on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/WhyPoetryMatters

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A.R.Ammons

I don’t know somehow it seems sufficient to see and hear whatever coming and going is, losing the self to the victory of stones and trees, of bending sandpit lakes, crescent round groves of dwarf pine: for it is not so much to know the self as to know it as it is known by galaxy and cedar cone, as if birth had never found it and death could never end it: the swamp’s slow water comes down Gravelly Run fanning the long stone-held algal hair and narrowing roils between the shoulders of the highway bridge: holly grows on the banks in the woods there, and the cedars’ gothic-clustered spires could make green religion in winter bones: so I look and reflect, but the air’s glass jail seals each thing in its entity: no use to make any philosophies here: I see no god in the holly, hear no song from the snowbroken weeds: Hegel is not the winter yellow in the pines: the sunlight has never heard of trees: surrendered self among unwelcoming forms: stranger, hoist your burdens, get on down the road.

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A.R. Ammons

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Honor a going thing, goldfinch, corporation, tree,

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A.R. Ammons

Honor a going thing, goldfinch, corporation, tree, morality: any working order, animate or inanimate: it has managed directed balance, the incoming and outgoing energies are working right, some energy left to the mechanism, some ash, enough energy held to maintain the order in repair, assure further consumption of entropy, expending energy to strengthen order: honor the persisting reactor, the container of change, the moderator: the yellow bird flashes black wing-bars in the new-leaving wild cherry bushes by the bay, startles the hawk with beauty, flitting to a branch where flash vanishes into stillness, hawk addled by the sudden loss of sight: honor the chemistries, platelets, hemoglobin kinetics, the light-sensitive iris, the enzymic intricacies of control, the gastric transformations, seed dissolved to acrid liquors, synthesized into chirp, vitreous humor, knowledge, blood compulsion, instinct: honor the unique genes, molecules that reproduce themselves, divide into sets, the nucleic grain transmitted in slow change through ages of rising and falling form, some cells set aside for the special work, mind or perception rising into orders of courtship, territorial rights, mind rising from the physical chemistries to guarantee that genes will be exchanged, male and female met, the satisfactions cloaking a deeper racial satisfaction: heat kept by a feathered skin: the living alembic, body heat maintained (bunsen burner under the flask) so the chemistries can proceed, reaction rates interdependent, self-adjusting, with optimum efficiency—the vessel firm, the flame staying: isolated, contained reactions! the precise and necessary worked out of random, reproducible, the handiwork redeemed from chance, while the goldfinch, unconscious of the billion operations that stay its form, flashes, chirping (not a great songster) in the bay cherry bushes wild of leaf.

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His participation in World war 2 impacted his writing. He started writing poetry on board a United States destroyer escort in the South Pacific during the Second World War. His first poems were about war dilemmas.

Another factor that impacted his writing is his birthplace/ location he grew up. Growing up in a tobacco/rice farming family and living in a small rural setting inspired him to write about nature.

The most important factor according to critics is his major. He majored in biology and it changed his poetic style to more like a scientific experiment. His vivid use of scientific language into his poetry is clearly seen in the poems that he wrote after graduating from the Wake Forest University.

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After getting his degree from Wake Forest university, he joined an elementary school as a principal

But for almost a decade he worked as a sales executive in his father-in-law's biological glass company on the southern New Jersey shore.

In 1964, He joined the  faculty of Cornell University and eventually becoming Goldwin Smith Professor of English and Poet in Residence.

He retired from Cornell in 1998

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He attended Wake Forest University majoring in Biology and then graduation in 1949

after a break

He attends University of California, Berkeley and receives his M.A in English from there

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in his office,Cornell University

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Born in 18th February, 1926

Grew up in Whiteville, NC in the south-eastern part of the state.

He was the youngest of a tobacco farmer's three surviving child.