Success Quote by A. R. Ammons

Ammons gives you a poet’s version of a manifesto, and it’s almost suspiciously level-headed. The opening - "I must stress" - reads like a preemptive defense against a familiar charge: that poets thrive on fog, not facts. He’s staking out a contrarian position in the culture’s lazy binary where art equals chaos and reason equals sterility. Ammons insists he can want "clarity" and still be a poet; more pointedly, he implies that the refusal of clarity can be its own kind of vanity.

The piling up of nouns - "clarity, order, meaning, structure, rationality" - works like a scaffold you can hear being assembled. It’s an incantation of systems, and the rhythm matters: he’s not merely listing virtues, he’s demonstrating them. Then he undercuts any whiff of absolutism with the phrase "whatever provisional stability we have". Provisional is the tell. Ammons isn’t praising order as a permanent settlement; he’s describing it as a temporary platform in a world that won’t stop moving. That’s a very Ammons move: the naturalist’s respect for flux paired with the craftsperson’s need for form.

The final pivot is the real argument: these stabilizers "can be the agents of gradual and successful change". It’s a quiet rebuke to revolutionary romance. Ammons suggests that rational structures aren’t the enemy of transformation; they’re the tools that make transformation stick. Subtext: if you want change that lasts, you don’t just feel your way there - you build it.