"A poem generated by its own laws may be unrealized and bad in terms of so-called objective principles of taste, judgement, deduction"
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Ammons is smuggling a dare into the dry language of critique: what if the poem answers to nothing but itself, and what if that self-governance makes it look like a failure to everyone keeping score with inherited rubrics? The phrase "generated by its own laws" casts the poem less as a crafted object and more as a living system, closer to weather or ecology than to a museum piece. That’s Ammons in miniature: a poet fascinated by process, by how forms arise, mutate, and sometimes collapse.
The real blade is "so-called objective principles". He doesn’t deny that standards exist; he questions the authority behind their supposed neutrality. By putting "objective" under quotation marks without using them, he performs the move he’s describing: undermining the legitimacy of taste-policing while keeping the argument cool enough to pass as reasonable. The subtext is institutional. Workshops, reviews, anthologies, and syllabi rely on shared criteria to sort the "good" from the "bad". Ammons points out that the most internally coherent work can still be dismissed as "unrealized" simply because it refuses the prevailing template for realization.
Context matters: postwar American poetry is a battleground between formal inheritance and experimental freedom, between the poem as artifact and the poem as event. Ammons, often aligned with a nature-driven, exploratory lyric, is defending poems that risk awkwardness as the price of discovering new rules. He’s not romanticizing mess; he’s insisting that a poem’s first obligation might be to its own necessity, even when that necessity makes it look, to the gatekeepers, like a mistake.
The real blade is "so-called objective principles". He doesn’t deny that standards exist; he questions the authority behind their supposed neutrality. By putting "objective" under quotation marks without using them, he performs the move he’s describing: undermining the legitimacy of taste-policing while keeping the argument cool enough to pass as reasonable. The subtext is institutional. Workshops, reviews, anthologies, and syllabi rely on shared criteria to sort the "good" from the "bad". Ammons points out that the most internally coherent work can still be dismissed as "unrealized" simply because it refuses the prevailing template for realization.
Context matters: postwar American poetry is a battleground between formal inheritance and experimental freedom, between the poem as artifact and the poem as event. Ammons, often aligned with a nature-driven, exploratory lyric, is defending poems that risk awkwardness as the price of discovering new rules. He’s not romanticizing mess; he’s insisting that a poem’s first obligation might be to its own necessity, even when that necessity makes it look, to the gatekeepers, like a mistake.
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| Topic | Poetry |
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