Education Quote by A. R. Ammons

Ammons is issuing a sly double order: teach poetry with everything you’ve got, and then don’t let “everything you’ve got” become the point. The phrase “teaching everything you can and keeping free of it” is the tell. It names the teacher’s permanent trap: the urge to convert poems into lessons, paraphrases, and tidy takeaways that can be tested, defended, and graded. Ammons doesn’t romanticize ignorance; he’s warning against a certain kind of mastery that suffocates the thing it claims to illuminate.

His key move is tactical, almost mischievous: “teach that poetry is a mode of discourse that differs from logical exposition.” Not “poetry is emotional,” not “poetry is pretty,” but discourse - language doing social, cognitive work. He’s pushing back on the classroom habit of treating poems as failed essays: if only we translate the metaphors, extract the theme, identify the speaker, we’ll arrive at the “meaning.” Ammons argues that meaning in poetry often arrives sideways: through pressure, sound, pattern, omission, contradiction, and the reader’s own attention. Logical exposition advances; poems circle, flare, refuse, insinuate.

The context matters. Ammons comes out of a postwar American tradition suspicious of doctrinaire systems - political, academic, even interpretive. “Besides the actual reading” also hints at the obvious thing schools underdo: time with the poem itself. His intent is pedagogical humility: build tools, then model how not to mistake the toolbox for the house.