Life & Wisdom Quote by A. R. Ammons

Ammons isn’t romanticizing the lonely genius so much as staking out a practical ethic: isolation as a working condition, not a personality. The phrasing is telling. “There’s something to be said” carries a mild, almost offhand defensiveness, as if he’s anticipating the predictable objections about community, collaboration, and being “in the world.” And then he insists on the paradox: isolation “in the real world.” Not in an ivory tower, not in some purified retreat, but inside the noise and obligations of ordinary life.

That tension is classic Ammons. His poems often watch natural systems with a patient, unsentimental attention, and attention is the real subject here. Isolation becomes a tool for recovering perception from the social churn of opinion, performance, and constant response. It’s also a quiet rebuke to the idea that art is primarily a public-facing identity. You don’t work “in isolation” to be apart from life; you do it to meet life without the mediating crowd.

Context matters: Ammons came up in a mid-century literary culture that valorized both the workshop community (Iowa, the MFA ecosystem) and the myth of the singular voice. He threads the needle. “Working” keeps it grounded: this is labor, routine, drafts, revision. The subtext is permission-giving. If you need long stretches of unshared time to think, to listen, to fail privately, that isn’t antisocial. It’s an argument that real-world immersion and solitude aren’t opposites; they’re the alternating currents that make sustained art possible.