"The poet exposes himself to the risk. All that has been said about poetry, all that he has learned about poetry, is only a partial assurance"
About this Quote
The second sentence is the quiet blade. “All that has been said” and “all that he has learned” names the entire apparatus around poetry - criticism, tradition, pedagogy, even the poet’s own accumulated habits. Ammons doesn’t dismiss it; he calls it “only a partial assurance.” That phrase carries the subtext of a life spent in a field that often seeks legitimacy through rules and explanations. The assurance is partial because the poem isn’t a math proof. It’s an encounter with contingency: mood, attention, the resistance of experience to neat phrasing, the possibility that the poem will fail or reveal something the poet didn’t intend to reveal.
Context matters here. Ammons wrote in the long afterglow of modernism, when poets inherited both a shattered set of certainties and an expanded permission to experiment. His work, famously attuned to nature and process, treats form as something discovered in motion, not imposed from above. The intent is almost ethical: poetry demands vulnerability, not just competence. You can study your way into the room, but you still have to walk onto the stage without guarantees. That’s the risk - and the point.
Quote Details
| Topic | Poetry |
|---|---|
| Source | Verified source: A Poem Is a Walk (A. R. Ammons, 1968)
Evidence: The poet exposes himself to the risk. All that has been said about poetry, all that he has learned about poetry, is only a partial assurance. (pp. 114–119 (quote appears within the essay; exact page within that range not verified from a scan)). Primary-source identification: the line occurs in A. R. Ammons’s prose essay/lecture “A Poem Is a Walk.” Multiple secondary reproductions and citations explicitly give the first publication as Epoch, Vol. XVIII, No. 1 (Fall 1968), pp. 114–119. The essay is also described as first presented as a lecture in 1967 (often specified as April 1967 at the International Poetry Forum in Pittsburgh), with the Epoch publication being the earliest clearly documented publication. Because I have not accessed a page-image/PDF scan of the 1968 Epoch issue itself in this search session, I cannot verify the precise page number inside pp. 114–119 where the sentence falls, only the article’s page range. Other candidates (1) Claims for Poetry (Donald Hall, 1982) compilation99.2% ... The poet exposes himself to the risk . All that has been said about poetry , all that he has learned about poetry... |
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Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Ammons, A. R. (2026, February 15). The poet exposes himself to the risk. All that has been said about poetry, all that he has learned about poetry, is only a partial assurance. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-poet-exposes-himself-to-the-risk-all-that-has-36446/
Chicago Style
Ammons, A. R. "The poet exposes himself to the risk. All that has been said about poetry, all that he has learned about poetry, is only a partial assurance." FixQuotes. February 15, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-poet-exposes-himself-to-the-risk-all-that-has-36446/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"The poet exposes himself to the risk. All that has been said about poetry, all that he has learned about poetry, is only a partial assurance." FixQuotes, 15 Feb. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-poet-exposes-himself-to-the-risk-all-that-has-36446/. Accessed 20 Feb. 2026.
