Complete Poems of A. R. Ammons

A.R. Ammons produced some of the twentieth century’s most innovative and enduring poetry, collected here for the first time in its entirety. Volume I follows Ammons’s development through his National Book Award-winning Collected Poems 1951–1971 and his daring work of the 1970s. The second volume rounds out Ammons’s rich middle phase and startling later work, including the posthumously published Bosh and Flapdoodle. The Complete Poems of A.R. Ammons offers authoritative texts of every published poem and includes over one hundred previously uncollected poems by “unquestionably among the best-loved poets of our time” (David Lehman).

[M]onumental and authoritative. . . . Ammons continued the American vernacular tradition of Whitman and Williams, pushing it in unexpected directions. . . . These books are large and sprawling and unwieldy, which is probably how Ammons would've wanted it.-- "Publishers Weekly, Best Books 2017"

A. R. Ammons’s (1926–2001) was a two-time winner of the National Book Award and the recipient of a National Book Critics Circle Award. His many additional honors include the Academy of American Poets’ Wallace Stevens Award, the Bollingen Prize, the Poetry Society of America’s Robert Frost Medal, the Ruth Lilly Prize, and fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations. Robert M. West is a professor of poetry and contemporary literature at Mississippi State University and lives in Starkville, Mississippi.