"In nature there are few sharp lines"
About this Quote
Ammons’s line is a small, sly act of resistance against the human craving for clean borders. “Few sharp lines” sounds like a field note, but it’s really a poetics manifesto: nature refuses our categories, and the insistence on crisp separations is more about our anxiety than the world’s design. The phrase pivots on “few,” not “no.” He’s not selling a gauzy oneness; he’s admitting there are edges, just rarely the kind that hold still long enough to be ruled on.
The intent is quietly corrective. In a culture that loves binaries - land vs. sea, self vs. other, order vs. chaos - Ammons points to gradients: marshes, dusk, seasons, weather fronts, erosion. Even the body is a continuum of exchanges. That scientific commonsense becomes ethical pressure. If boundaries in nature are provisional, then the hard lines we draw in politics, identity, and morality start to look like conveniences with consequences.
Subtextually, the quote also defends Ammons’s characteristic form: long, roaming poems that track thought as it meanders, revises, and doubles back. Sharp lines are what closed systems want - the neat aphorism, the final judgment, the definitive map. Ammons prefers the lived reality of “edge habitats,” where things mingle and mutate. The line’s calm tone is part of its bite: it doesn’t argue; it observes, and the observation undermines anyone selling certainty.
Context matters: a late-20th-century American poet steeped in ecology and empiricism, writing against both romantic nature-mysticism and managerial simplification. The world, he implies, is legible - just not in straight ink.
The intent is quietly corrective. In a culture that loves binaries - land vs. sea, self vs. other, order vs. chaos - Ammons points to gradients: marshes, dusk, seasons, weather fronts, erosion. Even the body is a continuum of exchanges. That scientific commonsense becomes ethical pressure. If boundaries in nature are provisional, then the hard lines we draw in politics, identity, and morality start to look like conveniences with consequences.
Subtextually, the quote also defends Ammons’s characteristic form: long, roaming poems that track thought as it meanders, revises, and doubles back. Sharp lines are what closed systems want - the neat aphorism, the final judgment, the definitive map. Ammons prefers the lived reality of “edge habitats,” where things mingle and mutate. The line’s calm tone is part of its bite: it doesn’t argue; it observes, and the observation undermines anyone selling certainty.
Context matters: a late-20th-century American poet steeped in ecology and empiricism, writing against both romantic nature-mysticism and managerial simplification. The world, he implies, is legible - just not in straight ink.
Quote Details
| Topic | Nature |
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