Life & Wisdom Quote by A. R. Ammons

Ammons is taking a scalpel to one of modern life’s favorite evasions: talking about living as if it were the same thing as living. “Discursive opinion” isn’t just chatter; it’s the whole sprawling machinery of commentary, interpretation, positioning. The word “discursive” matters because it implies roaming, looping, endlessly qualifying language - thought that can keep moving without ever arriving. “Direct experience,” by contrast, lands with a blunt, almost bodily force. No scaffolding. No hot takes. Just contact.

The intent isn’t anti-intellectual so much as anti-substitution. Ammons, a poet who spent decades paying attention to weather, fields, and the granular oddness of perception, is warning how easily the world gets replaced by our running narrative about it. The subtext is moral as much as aesthetic: opinion can be a shield. It lets us stay safe, supervised by our own explanations, while the unruly facts of being alive - sensation, grief, desire, awe - get managed into something discussable. “Everything” is the provocation, a deliberately unfair totality that mimics the suffocation he’s diagnosing.

Contextually, it reads like a late-20th-century anxiety before it became an internet default. Long before “discourse” turned into a meme, Ammons heard the problem: a culture that metabolizes experience into language at industrial speed. The line works because it’s short, hard, and accusatory, forcing the reader to notice their own reflex to respond with yet another opinion - which is exactly the trap.