"Once every five hundred years or so, a summary statement about poetry comes along that we can't imagine ourselves living without"
About this Quote
Ammons is poking at poetry’s strange dependence on aphorisms: the art that resists paraphrase keeps getting “explained” by one perfectly turned sentence that everyone clutches like a passport. The joke is scaled to epic time. “Once every five hundred years or so” is both mock-humble and faintly imperial, turning literary chatter into a geological cycle. It’s a poet’s way of saying: relax, the canon moves slowly, and our urgency to define poetry is mostly a nervous tic.
The phrase “summary statement” carries a quiet charge. Summaries are what you write when you can’t afford the whole thing. They’re what schools, critics, and overworked readers reach for to tame a form that thrives on ambiguity, music, and mood. Ammons isn’t endorsing the reduction; he’s diagnosing our hunger for it. We want a sentence that lets us feel initiated without doing the messy work of reading.
“We can’t imagine ourselves living without” is the real tell. It frames these definitions as cultural prosthetics: once the line lands, it rewires the discourse, shaping how poems get taught, defended, funded, even apologized for. It’s also a sly compliment to the rare critic-poet formulation that actually earns its keep, not by being true in a literal sense but by being usable - a tool for attention.
Contextually, Ammons writes from a late-20th-century moment saturated with theory and skepticism about grand claims. His wit doesn’t reject theory; it punctures the fantasy that any one sentence can contain poetry, even as he admits we’re going to keep needing that sentence anyway.
The phrase “summary statement” carries a quiet charge. Summaries are what you write when you can’t afford the whole thing. They’re what schools, critics, and overworked readers reach for to tame a form that thrives on ambiguity, music, and mood. Ammons isn’t endorsing the reduction; he’s diagnosing our hunger for it. We want a sentence that lets us feel initiated without doing the messy work of reading.
“We can’t imagine ourselves living without” is the real tell. It frames these definitions as cultural prosthetics: once the line lands, it rewires the discourse, shaping how poems get taught, defended, funded, even apologized for. It’s also a sly compliment to the rare critic-poet formulation that actually earns its keep, not by being true in a literal sense but by being usable - a tool for attention.
Contextually, Ammons writes from a late-20th-century moment saturated with theory and skepticism about grand claims. His wit doesn’t reject theory; it punctures the fantasy that any one sentence can contain poetry, even as he admits we’re going to keep needing that sentence anyway.
Quote Details
| Topic | Poetry |
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