1974
First Published
4.09
Average Rating
80
Number of Pages
"There wasn't one page of his poem that didn't delight me."―Donald Davie, New York Review of Books Sphere is the second of A. R. Ammons' long poems―following Tape for the Turn of the Year and preceding Garbage ―that mark him as a master of this particular form. The sphere in question is the earth itself, and Ammons' wonderfully stocked mind roams globally, ruminating on subjects that range from galaxies to gas stations. It is a remarkable achievement, comparable in importance to Wallace Stevens' Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction .
Avg Rating
4.09
Number of Ratings
131
5 STARS
41%
4 STARS
35%
3 STARS
17%
2 STARS
5%
1 STARS
2%
goodreads
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.
