SOURCE: "The Poetry of A. R. Ammons: Some Notes and Reflections," in Salmagundi, Nos. 22-23, Spring-Summer, 1973, pp. 285-93.

An American educator and critic, Waggoner was known for his expertise in the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne. His writings also include American Poets from the Puritans to the Present (1968) and American Visionary Poetry (1982). In the following excerpt, Waggoner compares and contrasts Ammons's poetry to that of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

What follows is simply some of the thoughts, and a few reflections on those thoughts, that have come to me as I have read through seven volumes of [Ammons'] poetry, the product of something more than a decade of writing. I do not own, am not near a library that contains, and so have not seen Ammons' first volume, Ommateum (1955), an omission which must qualify anything I may say about Ammons' development.

I write these notes seated in a mountain meadow...