"I can't tell you where a poem comes from, what it is, or what it is for: nor can any other man. The reason I can't tell you is that the purpose of a poem is to go past telling, to be recognised by burning"
About this Quote
Ammons refuses the tidy consumer label for poetry: origin, definition, use. That triple negation is a kind of aesthetic strike, aimed at the culture that keeps asking art to justify itself in the language of function. “Nor can any other man” widens the refusal into a quiet indictment of authority. Critics, professors, even poets themselves are demoted; no one gets to stand at the podium and translate the mystery into a safe memo.
The subtext is not anti-intellectual so much as anti-reductive. Ammons isn’t saying poems are vague; he’s saying they operate in a register where explanation becomes a category error. “Go past telling” rebukes the idea that a poem’s job is to deliver content you could paraphrase without loss. If you can summarize it cleanly, you’ve probably summarized the wrong thing.
Then he pivots from epistemology to experience: “to be recognised by burning.” The verb is key. Not understood, not decoded, not appreciated, but recognized - a meeting, not a conquest. “Burning” evokes heat, risk, and transformation: the way a line can flare up in the body, catching on memory or guilt or desire before the mind can organize it. That’s Ammons’ intent: to defend poetry as an event rather than an argument, a form that makes meaning the way weather does - by moving through you, leaving evidence. Context matters here: a late-20th-century American poet speaking against an era’s growing instrumentalism, insisting that the poem’s purpose is precisely what can’t be itemized without extinguishing the flame.
The subtext is not anti-intellectual so much as anti-reductive. Ammons isn’t saying poems are vague; he’s saying they operate in a register where explanation becomes a category error. “Go past telling” rebukes the idea that a poem’s job is to deliver content you could paraphrase without loss. If you can summarize it cleanly, you’ve probably summarized the wrong thing.
Then he pivots from epistemology to experience: “to be recognised by burning.” The verb is key. Not understood, not decoded, not appreciated, but recognized - a meeting, not a conquest. “Burning” evokes heat, risk, and transformation: the way a line can flare up in the body, catching on memory or guilt or desire before the mind can organize it. That’s Ammons’ intent: to defend poetry as an event rather than an argument, a form that makes meaning the way weather does - by moving through you, leaving evidence. Context matters here: a late-20th-century American poet speaking against an era’s growing instrumentalism, insisting that the poem’s purpose is precisely what can’t be itemized without extinguishing the flame.
Quote Details
| Topic | Poetry |
|---|
More Quotes by R. Ammons
Add to List
