Art & Creativity Quote by A. R. Ammons

Ammons is doing that poet’s trick of sounding generous while quietly sharpening the knife. He starts with a harmless premise - ask a vague question, get a vague answer - then punctures the kind of lofty, ready-made definitions that often pass for literary wisdom. “Poetry is the music of words” is the sort of line that flatters the listener into feeling they’ve understood something without committing to anything testable. Ammons isn’t saying those definitions are wrong; he’s saying they’re structurally inevitable once you choose the wrong doorway in.

The subtext is a critique of how institutions talk about art: the classroom prompt, the panel discussion, the grant application. Big abstractions invite ornate mist. By pairing “music of words” with the more pretentious-sounding “linguistic correction of disorder,” Ammons exposes two common rhetorical disguises: the inspirational cliche and the pseudo-scientific upgrade. One is sentimental, the other professionalized, and both can become evasions - ways to avoid the lived particulars of poems: tone, pressure, surprise, line breaks that change the weather of a sentence.

Context matters: Ammons came up in postwar American poetry, suspicious of grand systems and allergic to the idea that poetry needs a single mission statement. His work often builds meaning through attention, not proclamation. This remark reads like a manifesto for specificity: if you want a real answer about poetry, ask a real question. Not “What is it?” but “What does it do here, in this poem, on this line, to this reader, at this moment?”