Life & Wisdom Quote by A. R. Ammons

Ammons slips a small rebuke into a sentence that sounds, at first, like a shrug. The opening hedge - "Probably" - is doing real work: it’s the poet’s way of conceding uncertainty while still insisting on an ethic of attention. In Ammons’s world, attention is never wasted outright; even misdirected focus can fertilize the ground for something better. That’s the generous half of the line.

Then he turns the knife. If poetry gets attention, he suggests, it’s often the wrong kind: the spotlight falls on "lesser" values more reliably than "greater" ones. The phrasing echoes the economy of reviews, prizes, syllabi, and cultural chatter that reward what’s legible, fashionable, or easily packaged. "Lesser" doesn’t just mean bad poems; it signals the metrics surrounding poems - reputation, trend, marketability, the dopamine hit of being seen - which can become the real object of devotion. The subtext is institutional: poetry’s ecosystem trains readers to praise what can be quickly validated, not what might quietly rewire you.

Context matters because Ammons spent a career resisting the idea of poetry as a prestige object. His work is roomy, observational, suspicious of grand pronouncements, more interested in processes than monuments. This line reads like a field note from inside the art form: attention is a resource, and poetry can convert it into value, but culture has a habit of investing in the wrong portfolio. The wit lies in how calmly he states an accusation that could start a fight in any prize committee meeting.