Poetry for Students

78 Poetry for Students

Author Biography

Archie Randolph Ammons was born on February

18, 1926, at his parents’ farmhouse near Whiteville,

North Carolina. His childhood was spent with his

parents and two older sisters on the family’s to-

bacco farm, which his grandfather had built. It was

during these formative years that he developed the

understanding of nature and appreciation of its

complexity that is evident in almost all of his po-

ems. After graduating from Whiteville High School

in 1943, he went to work in the navy shipyard at

Wilmington, North Carolina. He enrolled in the

Navy in 1944 and did a tour of duty in the South

Pacific during the end of World War II. While in

the Navy, during the long night watches, Ammons

began to write poetry.

When the war was over, Ammons took advan-

tage of the G. I. Bill, a law that subsidized college

tuition for veterans. He attended Wake Forest Uni-

versity, changing his major often between pre-med-

icine, biology, chemistry, and general science. In

1949, he graduated with a bachelor of science de-

gree, and soon after he was married. After a few years

of graduate school at the University of California at

Berkley, he went to work for a small company in

southern New Jersey that made glass products for

laboratories. He was there for twelve years, during

which time his first two poetry collections were pub-

lished. At a poetry reading at Cornell University, he

discussed the idea of teaching with another faculty

member. The next year he was hired, the start of a

long-term relationship between Ammons and Cor-

nell that was to last for the rest of his life.

Ammons has won the National Book Award

twice, first for Collected Poems, 1951–1971(1972)

and second for the book-length poem Garbage

(1993). In 1993, the Poetry Society awarded Am-

mons the Robert Frost Medal in recognition of his

life’s work. “The City Limits” can be found in

Briefings: Poems Small and Easy(1971), in which

it was first published, and in Collected Poems,

1951–1971. Ammons died in Ithaca, New York, on

February 25, 2001, at the age of seventy-five.

Poem Summary

When you consider the radiance, that it does not

withhold

itself but pours its abundance without selection into

every

nook and cranny not overhung or hidden; when

you consider

that birds’ bones make no awful noise against the

light but

lie low in the light as in a high testimony; when 5

you consider

the radiance, that it will look into the guiltiest

swervings of the weaving heart and bear itself upon

them,

not flinching into disguise or darkening; when you

consider

the abundance of such resource as illuminates the

glow-blue

bodies and gold-skeined wings of flies swarming^10

the dumped

guts of a natural slaughter or the coil of shit and in

no

way winces from its storms of generosity; when

you consider

that air or vacuum, snow or shale, squid or wolf,

rose or lichen,

each is accepted into as much light as it will take,

then

the heart moves roomier, the man stands and looks 15

about, the

leaf does not increase itself above the grass, and

the dark

work of the deepest cells is of a tune with May

bushes

and fear lit by the breadth of such calmly turns to

praise.

The City Limits

A. R. Ammons

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