Garbage
By A.R. Ammons
1993
First Published
4.07
Average Rating
128
Number of Pages
Winner of the National Book Award. "A. R. Ammons' poem with the unforgettable title is a defense of meaning―'this,' the poet says, 'are awash in ideality.' Garbage is an epic of ideas: all life―not that of human beings alone, but every species―is shown to be part of an ultimate reality. Eternity is here and now. The argument ranges widely with a wealth of images taken from science, and the world around us, the writing by turns impassioned and witty. For power of the thought and language, the poem takes its place alongside Whitman's Song of Myself ―an American classic."―Citation for the 1993 National Book Award for Poetry
Avg Rating
4.07
Number of Ratings
758
5 STARS
42%
4 STARS
33%
3 STARS
18%
2 STARS
5%
1 STARS
2%
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Author
A.R. Ammons
Author · 24 books
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 at Berkeley. His honors included the Academy's Wallace Stevens Award, the Poetry Society of America's Robert Frost Medal, the Ruth Lilly Prize, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lived in Ithaca, New York, where he was Goldwin Smith Professor of Poetry at Cornell University until his retirement in 1998. Ammons died on February 25, 2001.
