Corsons Inlet

by A.R. Ammons

Consisting of some of his best early work, including such strikingly inventive poems as "Jungle Knot," "Coon Song," "Four Motions for the Pea Vines," and the title piece, this volume provides incontestable evidence of Ammons's rapid early growth as a poet, of his ever-broadening range and deepening perception. Corsons Inlet, like Ammons's Tape for the Turn of the Year, shows clearly his remarkable originality—and, more important, his lavish and unique poetic gifts.

Genres: Poetry

64 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1965

About the author

Archie Randolph Ammons was born outside Whiteville, North Carolina, on February 18, 1926. He started writing poetry aboard a U. S. Navy destroyer escort in the South Pacific. After completing service in World War II, he attended Wake Forest University and the University of California at Berkeley.

His honors included the Academy's Wallace Stevens Award, the Poetry Society of America's Robert Frost Medal, the Ruth Lilly Prize, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

He lived in Ithaca, New York, where he was Goldwin Smith Professor of Poetry at Cornell University until his retirement in 1998. Ammons died on February 25, 2001.

Reviews

[Uther Pendragon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Helen Vendler called Ammons "one of the great American poets of the twentieth century" and Harold Bloom wrote: “Ammons’s poetry does for me what [Wallace] Stevens’s did earlier, and the High Romantics before that; it helps me to live my life."

There's a reason why A. R. Ammons was admired by poets and readers as well as critics and other academics: he was a master of his craft.

Some of his many honors include two National Book Awards, a National Book Critics Circle Award, Library of Congress’s Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, and the Bollingen Prize for Poetry.

Corsons Inlet is the product of a profound intelligence. These poems are fiercely beautiful and rich with meaning.

Read this book.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked a lot of the poems in this collection, but several seemed average at best. I think his various Selected Poems editions, such as Briefings by A. R. Ammons, are a better way to enjoy Ammons. He excelled at the pithy, observant poem.