SOURCE: "The Poetry of A. R. Ammons," in The South Carolina Review, Vol. 12, No. 1, Fall, 1979, pp. 2-9.

Reid was an American educator and critic. In the following essay, he traces Ammons's emergence as a major post-modern writer who has rejected modernist sensibilities and seeks humankind's integration with the universe.

On the essence of Ammons's poetry:

Ammons is the poet of perception, of vision as experience. Like Louis MacNeice, the "I" of Ammons's poetry feels "the drunkenness of things being several," but instead of fusing the separateness of creation in one mind, he holds it as it is, utterly particularized, in an orgy of precision. No matter how numerous the bricks, for him no building emerges; the whole of experience is always less than the sum of its parts: "Overall is beyond me: is the sum of these events/I cannot draw, the ledger I cannot keep, the accounting...