A. R. Ammons Quotes

Archie Randolph Ammons was an American poet who won the annual National Book Award for Poetry in 1973 and 1993. He wrote about humanity's relationship to nature in alternately comic and solemn tones. Ammons grew up on a tobacco farm near Whiteville, North Carolina, in the southeastern part of the state. He served in the U.S. Navy during World War II, stationed on board the U.S.S. Gunason, a battleship escort. After the war, Ammons attended Wake Forest University, majoring in biology.Graduating in 1949, he served as a principal and teacher at Hattaras Elementary School later that year and also married Phyllis Plumbo. He received an M.A. in English from the University of California, Berkeley.In 1964, Ammons joined the faculty of Cornell University, eventually becoming Goldwin Smith Professor of English and Poet in Residence. He retired from Cornell in 1998. Ammons had been a longtime resident of Northfield, New Jersey, and Millville, New Jersey, when he wrote Corsons Inlet in 1962. Ammons's other awards include a 1981 National Book Critics Circle Award for A Coast of Trees a 1993 Library of Congress Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry for Garbage the 1971 Bollingen Prize for Sphere; the Poetry Society of America's Robert Frost Medal the Ruth Lilly Prize and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1978.