A.R. Ammons is the foremost living representative of the American Romantic tradition in poetry. In an era when most contemporary poets have abandoned the broad concerns of Romanticism in favor of more narrowly delimited realms - personal experience, pop culture, Jungian mysticism, identity politics - Ammons continues to speak with the kind of generalizing scope found in such forebears as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Wallace Stevens. Yet Ammons is keenly aware of the pitfalls associated with this tradition, its propensity for afflatus and abstraction, its seeming remoteness from immediate realities, the evasiveness behind its transcendental claims. His great achievement has been to carry the Emersonian line forward into our own skeptical age, devising a host of formal, stylistic, and rhetorical means to preserve its essential gestures while firmly rooting them in a gritty and scientifically precise vision. The title of his recent long...